“Everything that Apple did, and didn’t do, with its Mac lineup this year tells me the company would rather be selling more iPads and iPhones,” Vlad Savov writes for The Verge.
“he departures from the 2016 MacBook Pro — MagSafe charger, USB and memory card slots, and a keyboard with more than 0.55mm of travel — are all things the iPad lacks. The improvements to the same machine — thinner, lighter, all-metal chassis, a display with wider color gamut, and a sliver of a touchscreen called the Touch Bar — are all things the iPad has,” Savov writes. “If it’s not perfectly obvious, Apple’s efforts with its new Macs are to wean its old users off their desktop and laptop habits and familiarize them with the new world of touchscreen PCs. ”
“What that means for macOS is that it’s fast turning into legacy software: an afterthought on its way to becoming abandonware,” Savov writes. “This may all sound very dramatic, but yesterday’s report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, someone with impeccable connections within Apple’s ranks, agrees with my assessment: ‘In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there’s no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve long been saying, iOS devices and OS X Macs inevitably are going to grow closer over time, not just in hardware, but in software, too.
As we wrote two years ago:
Think code convergence (more so than today) with UI modifications per device. A unified underlying codebase for Intel, Apple A-series, and, in Apple’s labs, likely other chips, too (just in case). This would allow for a single App Store for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users that features a mix of apps: Some that are touch-only, some that are Mac-only, and some that are universal (can run on both traditional notebooks and desktops as well as on multi-touch computers like iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and – pretty please, Apple – Apple TV). Don’t be surprised to see Apple A-series-powered Macs, either. — MacDailyNews Take, January 9, 2014
Furthermore:
There is no reason why Apple could not offer both A-series-powered Macs and Intel-based Macs. The two are not mutually exclusive… — MacDailyNews, January 14, 2015