Unifying iPadOS and macOS

I've written about this before, in "The Mac and the iPad aren't meeting in the middle yet":

https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html

While I won't repeat myself too much, my basic point is that Apple sees iOS (and iPadOS) devices as application consoles and Macs as general purpose computers, and there is no good business case for changing that any time soon. The Venn diagram of "users likely to walk over such a drastic change to the Mac" and "users likely to spend boggling amounts of money on Apple hardware" is close to a perfect circle, and the accounting department would probably not be super keen on taking the bet that the increased service revenue from shoving all app sales through the App Store would make up for the last hardware sales. You need 15–30% of a hell of a lot of apps to make up for a single lost 16-inch MacBook Pro sale, let alone a Mac Pro.

Furthermore: given all the radical changes Apple made to the Mac in 2020, that still feels like the "now or never" moment. I wrote back in April that "if M1 Macs and macOS Big Sur didn't lock us into an App Store-only world, it's pretty unlikely macOS Pismo Beach or whatever is going to." Well, it's a year later, and macOS Monterey still isn't. Maybe in a year or two macOS Fresno will come along and prove me wrong, but I'm pretty confident it won't.

The flip side of this is that I don't think iPadOS is going to be opened up. I also wrote that I didn't think we would be able to run macOS apps on M1 iPad Pros the way we can run iOS apps on M1 Macs; that's holding true so far, too. I'll note here, though, that the Hacker News crowd has specific ideas about What Makes a Real Computer that I don't think are widely shared by the non-engineer crowd, and that honestly a lot of you don't have a clear idea of how much automation and app interoperability is possible within iOS's restrictions. I prefer using the Mac, in no small part because I've been using Unix for close to three decades, but it's startling how much I'm able to do on the iPad even with its current nerfball limitations.

And, sure, the obvious objection is that "application console" is arbitrary, and it is. But isn't "game console" just as arbitrary? I mean, a PlayStation 5 has an 8-core CPU with 16GB of RAM; you can't develop software on it because Sony won't let you, full stop. We're more annoyed about that limitation being on the iPad because the arbitrariness feels more obvious, because we didn't buy the iPad "only" for gaming. But on a technical level, there's not a whole lot of difference.

The linked article makes the prediction that Apple is going to be trying to drive more and more people to the iPad and away from the Mac. I don't buy that, simply because the evidence just doesn't support it. They have literally just reported the strongest quarter of Mac sales in the company's history. It's not just that they're moving to their own CPU architecture, it's that they're in the process of rolling out new industrial designs for the entire Mac lineup. This is not what you do if your business goal is to have Mac sales taper off!

My feeling now remains the same as it did, er, all the way back in April: iPadOS and macOS are never going to merge. In the long run, there is going to be an operating system that replaces both of them, and the groundwork for that new OS is being laid out now. But it's not going to be here any time soon, and nobody (including me) should be making confident predictions about what that new OS will be -- what it will and won't do, what it will and won't allow, how locked down or open it will be.

I agree with you about discoverability, but in practice I find that tasks aren't completely new every time, there usually are common principles. With usage, you kinda get to know what is and isn't possible, even if you don't recall the precise details of each and every command. So you can look them up, knowing more or less what you're looking for.

On Linux, `--help` usually... helps. Or there's the man. On Windows, the MS docs are usually usable to find things.

Of course, it may not work 100% of the time, but I find it's a question of philosophy. I'm not a Windows user, so I generally approach it with a mentality of "it would be nice to be able to do this, let me check real quick if there's a way". I usually manage to not have to click around for two hours when I have to do something repetitive.

I think I saw a command line tool that would show the documentation for all flags when you pressed tab... I don't remember it's name, though.

You forgot Newton: applications are components written in a memory safe language all running in the same address space with full access to each others’ objects. The “imagine…” scenarios above are entirely doable (indeed, were done) in NewtonOS.

You mean like this: https://nexdock.com/samsung-dex-laptop/