Unifying iPadOS and macOS • Hacker News Board

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#141

Post by danielrhodes » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #65

They can’t get rid of a general purpose OS. They have to have products that allow you to write software for the iDevices, and web applications, in general. You need macOS for these things.

Virtualization.

I have never needed to access the shell on my iPhone. But to do dev work I obviously need it on my Mac. But if you look at the rise of Docker and other such things, running stuff on the core OS is not always very optimal. It would be just as good to have a virtualized machine in whatever OS I want and be able to take that around with me. When I can have that, I don’t really care how locked down they make the OS as long as I can stay productive.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#142

Post by adrusi » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #135

adrusi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's roughly as good as your other two options, none of which are terrible. I'm not trying to insult the people who use.. literally any operating system available today. But surely you can imagine ways that macOS could be better suited to your needs. Why (to give an example that's easy to explain briefly, not necessarily the most important one) are the various things you have open organized primarily by which ap…

You can use separate desktops. I don’t bother though

Yes. And yet people who use workspaces still use windows with multiple tabs, and have the layout of windows in the workspace dictated by application-level sorting.

I actually used a desktop that let you group content from different application in the same group of tabs for a couple years in college, by using i3/sway and a custom Firefox extension. It's an upgrade over just workspaces. I stopped working this way because I switched to tree-style-tabs and there's no window manager that gives you anything like that, and it was on net a workflow improvement.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#143

Post by emodendroket » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

eecc wrote: post #139

emodendroket wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to remember all the arguments for a passel of command line utils. Discoverablility is much better for a GUI, and only someone who wishes to do something unusual or specialized will chafe against the limitations.

Uh no. Take clicking around a Microsoft ISS configuration on Windows 2000 vs an Apache httpd config file and it’s online doc. I briefly tried both, and didn’t look back

For a task like configuring a Web server you're right. But do you think most tasks people do on a computer are like that? I don't think that they are.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#144

Post by warning26 » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #138

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now. The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be s…

Not necessarily disagreeing, but my key question here is: how will Apple handle lower-level development cases? It's not difficult to imagine a watered-down iPad XCode shipping, but what about the tooling they use to build iOS itself?

After all, Apple has to use something to develop iOS, and I think it's unlikely they'd create a special in-house operating system for the exclusive use of their OS development teams that's totally different than what they ship to consumers.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#145

Post by canuckintime » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #92

tacker2000 wrote: post #73

Maybe the future will be 90% of normal users using dumbed down touch devices, and the rest of us “power” users who need to develop stuff will be using a normal OS. Maybe the normal OSes that we all grew up with are actually overkill for these other users and they dont even want it. Why would they need a shell? Or the ability to install some arbitrary programs? They only need email and word and thats it. Maybe this is…

It's sad that we can only think of touch screen interfaces as "dumbed down". The affordances of a touch-centric interface have yet to be fully explored; at least in principle, there's no reason why they could not be made just as capable as a keyboard+mouse.

It all comes down to text input. Steve Jobs launched the iPhone with only a touch screen but he launched the iPad with a hardware keyboard accessory (discontinued after a year but then reintroduced with the iPad Pro). So with iPadOS it’s always really been touch+keyboard and frankly mouse+keyboard is better.

If Apple managed to offer a revolutionary input for the iPad (perhaps subvocalised speech input or a a redesigned touch/pen input) it would be the first step to a touch-centric interface as capable as keyboard+mouse

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#146

Post by jdavis703 » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

warning26 wrote: post #144

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #138

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now. The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be s…

Not necessarily disagreeing, but my key question here is: how will Apple handle lower-level development cases? It's not difficult to imagine a watered-down iPad XCode shipping, but what about the tooling they use to build iOS itself? After all, Apple has to use something to develop iOS, and I think it's unlikely they'd create a special in-house operating system for the exclusive use of their OS development teams that…

Why are you assuming iPadOS wouldn’t support low-level development?

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#147

Post by pininja » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

memetomancer wrote: post #125

I for one ain't bothered: It's clear to me that Apple needs tools to engineer these spectacular devices and there would be little or no sense to them designing away the power of MacOS and landing on a product range limited to simple consumption. Does anyone foresee a time where Apple migrates to something like Lenovo Laptops or Windows or some scraggly Linux desktop environment? Apple won't be losing these tools any…

I’ve pretty excited for the day I can do my programming job on an iPad in addition to my laptop. Apple has captured the software engineering market very well. Even the Microsoft F# shop I worked at had Apple hardware on most desks running Parallels or Boot Camp, and the two jobs I’ve had since were standard-issue MacBook Pro.

The pipeline you described reminds me of Apple Shortcuts - it’s easy and useful. Most recently I made a GIF out of a bunch of photos on my phone, which is a simple task that used to require a far from ideal app (ads, black-box that could be hiding analytics and tracking tasks).

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#148

Post by CDSlice » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #138

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now. The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be s…

> imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.

You are correct, one of those is not like the others, but it isn’t the Macs. According to their latest earnings report, iPhones made Apple $39.57B, iPads $7.37B, and Macs $8.24B [0]. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPadOS and MacOS merged in the near future, especially since they are running on the same chips, but it won’t be because iPads are the ones making all the money.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/27/apple-aapl-earnings-q3-2021....

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#149

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #122

emodendroket wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to remember all the arguments for a passel of command line utils. Discoverablility is much better for a GUI, and only someone who wishes to do something unusual or specialized will chafe against the limitations.

UI discoverability has massively declined with the advent of touch UIs though. You can't hover a UI item to see what it does, and there's a lot of non-intuitive "magic swipes" and hidden UI elements in smartphone UIs which you just have to know about.

Touch UI items tend to be larger by necessity (and to have surrounding padding as a safety factor, which increases their "effective" size even further), so you don't really need to do the hover thing. Just redesign them to be more self-explanatory as opposed to wasting that space.

"Magic swipes" could also be redesigned to be more intuitive, e.g. with some background soft-3D effects that make swipe-sensitive areas "stand out" from the neutral background.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#150

Post by freediver » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #35

FractalHQ wrote: post #29

I bought an iPad Pro recently, and I hate the fact that I can’t run any of my favorite macOS apps on it despite the fact that the hardware is more than capable. And no web browsers / browser extensions / PWAs? It feels like a toy. Very disappointing.

Return it and get a MacBook for around the same price. I don’t understand the point of iPad Pros being so powerful when they can’t - y’know - run even Apple’s own Pro software. (Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro) They’re mind-numbingly expensive toys, for sure.

This. Not only that but newest M1 is a league on its own and a clear path for Apple to dominate the desktop market. What Apple should do is entrench their hardware position with M2 and M3 and heavily invest in macOS for desktop compute purposes.