“Apple CEO Tim Cook [last] week talked about a ‘post-PC world.’ Many people treated his comments as controversial, exaggerated or outright marketing lies,” Mike Elgan writes for Cult of Mac.
“In fact, everything Cook said about it was literally true and perfectly accurate. He said the post-PC revolution ‘is happening all around us at an amazing pace and Apple is at the forefront and leading this revolution,'” Elgan writes. “He didn’t say we currently live in a post-PC world, or that in the future PCs would not exist. He specifically said ‘we’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center of your digital world.'”
“What he didn’t say — so I will — was that the transition from the PC world to the post-PC world involves a transition from a Microsoft world to an Apple world,” Elgan writes. “For the past few decades, Windows has been the dominant platform and Mac OS has been a minority operating system. Here’s why their positions will be reversed in the years to come.”
Elgan writes, “The right thing to do for Microsoft would have been something like iOS — a single, light multi-touch operating system that spans from wristwatches to tablets that in no way is compatible with, shares code with or is in any way the same as Windows… Instead, they made the mistake of the millennium (so far): Instead of starting ‘lite’ and growing up, they started ‘heavy’ and dumbed down… Dinosaurs have almost never been able to act in their future best interest when it conflicts with their present best interest.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For as long as it takes!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “CognativeDisonance” for the heads up.]
Microsoft is steering a perfectly straight course. Please, Mr. Ballmer, do not deviate from your plans!
Microsoft is the dinosaur to Apple’s faster, lighter mammals — and the age of the terrible lizard is coming to an end.
Didn’t Apple start “heavy” and then go “lite”? Starting from Mac OS X, they pared it down to its core and used that for iOS. The key difference was that Mac OS X was scalable from powering supercomputers to iPods.
Thats how I understood OSX to be also. iOS was the scaled portable version – essentially.
So, when I read what “Ken1w” said i was rather confused. As he had mentioned iOS would eventually become core to OSX.
Perhaps he means the development of iOS as it is now, will become sort of a PLUG-IN core to OSX for future cross-development.
Nope! Darwin is the core. The only things that were adapted are the frameworks: Foundation, UIKit, etc. Even then, the majority of the IOS frameworks were not really adapted but more like inspired by their Cocoa counterparts.
So no. Not quite.
Thanks BRN.
Darwin was an open-source OS that had similar ingredients that of Mac OS X, as well with iOS. Three OSes have similar ingredients. However, does that mean Darwin sits inside OSX. I thought, the core or is it the kernel was Mach. Is that still the case today is Mach still is the kernel? And is the kernel the core?
Got my answer, thx
A kernel is the core component of every computer operating system.
Oh damn. getting int deeper water here.
Kernel, core, microkernel and exokernels.
OSX uses Mach but not as a microkernel.
– task
– threads
– ports
– messages
are the fundamentals to Mach called the IPC.
Mach was designed as a “drop-in” replacement for the traditional UNIX kernel.
SO, perhaps “ken1w” has it possibly right. iOS might very well act as a Abstraction Layer to a higher advanced OSX one day.
@ WaterLily
you also need to know there are Monolithic, Modular, Megalithic and Nanokernels also. Oh and both OSX and Windows are Hybrid or Modular. Enjoy the tour.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say potato…
The kernel killed Elvis by feeding him the otherkernel’s chicken.
Yeah, there’s a whole lot of contradictions going on that keep people confused.
In one sense, Apple has more of a “unified” strategy, and MS has the split strategy. Because, as you say, the core of both OS X and iOS are identical. Where as, MS is presenting the perception, as usual, of “Windows everywhere” while Windows 8 won’t be running on ARM tablets and Metro on Windows 8 on is merely window dressing.
So what is actually running on ARM? Something that is less related to Windows than iOS is to OS X! What is it? The equivalent of Quartz on OS X / iOS ? Something like Web OS (but .net instead of Java).
And yet, Apple is actually happy to speak of and brand iOS and OS X separately. This is because they are designed for different things and Apple concentrates on UX that benefits the user, who “hires different devices for different jobs”. MS would rather push Windows and let your work and user experience suffer.
So yeah, one of the contradictions is that Apple actually started big in the sense they started with the core of OS X that was already in use in their desktop OS. While the only way for MS to “dumb down” was to throw something extra ON TOP of the behemoth of Windows, making it even bigger, then shove that extra bit over to tablets, and tell everyone Windows is everywhere. Go figure.
That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking.
MS seems to be shooting for some kind of unified UI experience built on top of two different OSes–the Intel OS and the ARM OS.
Apple has built two very different UIs on the same OS core.
Note that Apple has already finished the heavy lifting and already has multiple generations of successful products in place with a complete ecosystem for both the pre & post PC world.
MS still has their PC ecosystems in place, of course, but their post PC world is still an ecological wasteland.
Microsoft seems to be just waking up.
Finding themselves in the ‘Land of the Lost’ and without a lighter to spark any new ideas of their own.
Follow Apples’ lead or be doomed.
Splitting Atoms or splitting OSes; understanding what you got by braking things down into smaller portions for study.
iOS was the result of the OSX dissection – well seen from the days of NeXT as to the power harnessed within.
Microsoft’s Board of Directors is going to rue the day they left Balmer in the catbird seat for so long.
Carnegie Mellon University, lead developer on the Mach project, was Richard Rashid. Who then worked at Microsoft back in 1990.
How could Microsoft have not foresee a similar plan to strip the core of Windows down to a more portable factor?
They did. The NT kernel has been ported over to multiple platforms over the years. It just happens that x86 was always the dominant one and MS never went very far on other platforms.
They had a version of Windows NT 4 on x86, MIPS and Alpha. There was a build of Windows 2000 on Alpha also.
The latest test builds of Windows Phone OS are running on PhoneNT, it is the NT kernel.
Windows on ARM is also running on the NT kernel. MS ported Windows over to ARM, the whole OS.
What they are not doing is providing any way of running x86 windows applications on ARM. They are pushing WinRT, which is what Metro runs on and they are pushing that as the future of Windows development on the desktop and tablet/phone/whatever regardless of processor.
Microsoft will never recover from the damage Ballmer has inflicted on the company. Poetic justice.
Microsoft will start making sense about the same time Republicans do. It is the official Republican Computer.
Gates is a Republican. Jobs was and contributed to, The Democratic Party. Jobs even hosted President Clinton when he same to visit his daughter when she was at Stanford.
Now that your conservative heads have exploded, chew on that for a season.
Apple == The Foundation
Steve Jobs == Hari Seldon
Microsoft == Galactic Empire
Sorry, couldn’t resist the Isaac Asimov comparison… 🙂
Hmmm…. and who then is the R. Daneel Olivaw character in this scenario then – the one enduring influence that saw the whole majestic plan through to completion?
Siri, or an offspring
I’d like to be The Mule please.
A very good friend of mine bought an iPad last summer. She no longer uses her PC or her Mac. Many other colleagues, friends family and other users have done the same. I said this in my article about the iPad. In that article I said that 95% (not all) of people can do everything on the iPad that they used the PC for. It’s coming true Here is the article:
Dinosaurs have almost never been able to act in their future best interest when it conflicts with their present best interest.
IOW the Adage of our Age:
‘Short Term Thinking,
Long Term Disaster.’
Proven over and over and over and over . . .
I want to hear the lamentations of their women!
Sounds like the Iliad…
Once Apple lands a couple of properly timed and executed commercials showing iPad as a content creation tool including the use of diction with Pages and so forth, it will be game over for PC as a device for average users.
Oballmer…
Blazing guns… leading the cavalry… in the wrong direction!
Fester’s Last Stand?