No way Apple is going to cannibalize their new little fanless laptops. Jobs is long gone.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iPad An OS X tablet
- Thread starter sjleworthy
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
No way Apple is going to cannibalize their new little fanless laptops. Jobs is long gone.
I am sure ios apps like Ferrite will be replacing Pro Tools and other osx/win applications. Ipad pro: the form factor sucks for audio, no mouse, no external storage, no finder, no video out. No thanks.
And Steve Jobs is also the one who said that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea.
I am really hoping MS gets surface book right this year--l love the concept, but it has been a troubled production cycle. Looking at the Vaio canvas--it really seems desktop performance is coming to ultra book form factors. I am also a fan of the ipp as a tablet and sketchpad.
I like it when Apple kills off a category look at the MacBook Air why ? It's perfect for Apple to say it's the best selling of its type but we are ending it. Now look at this just update your iPad Pro to run Mac OSX. Everyone who was gonna buy a MacBook Air runs out to buy a iPad Pro instead. They need a shake up to boost tablet sales. They will sell more iPad Pros this way.
Except it's not that simple. iPads run on ARM processors. Macs run on Intel processors. Even the maligned Core M is faster at most tasks than the A9X. However, the Core M isn't as efficient as the A9X, and would need to run iOS apps in emulation, which would hurt both performance and battery life. Similarly, the A9X isn't powerful enough to run Intel apps in emulation. It would have 2007-class performance at best (and people complained about the 12" MacBook having "2011" performance).
More likely, Apple is going to add features to the next versions of iOS for the iPad Pro to make it more capable of the remaining tasks where people still use Macs or Windows PCs.
Just because Jobs said something is a bad idea, doesn't mean he would never do it. One year, he said nobody wanted to watch videos on a tiny screen like the click wheel iPod. Next year, Apple came out with the video iPod. Another year, he said nobody read books anymore. Next year, Apple introduced the iBooks app and store. I was thinking that maybe Jobs saying something was a bad idea could be a pretty good predictor of what Apple would do next, but unfortunately he passed away before I could fully test this theory.
Ulysses is a great example, where they are trying to keep feature parity as much as possible. And 2.5 has done a lot to make sure I can do everything on the iPad that I can on the Mac, and now I can start a "seed" of an idea on the iPhone and expand on it on the iMac or iPad later. Very nice.
I just wish Omnifocus / Things would get a bit better at that sort of parity. They are my favorite apps, but Omnifocus seems to actually lose simplicity in its feature set, and Things is just glacial in terms of updates. And none of the other apps really appeal to me. It's so bad that I've actually considered throwing my hat into the ring, but haven't since I know for a fact that it'd have to be a full time gig in a crowded market to even think about being able to do it justice.
It's not even about cannibalism (although Apple would much prefer to cannibalize itself than protect a market just to see someone else cannibalize it).
What would this even look like? An iPad with a Core M in it? An ARM version of OS X? Do we then need something like the iOS Simulator to run iOS apps? Would devs need to recompile? Can you convince certain third parties (*cough*Adobe*cough*) to port to it?
And with all this does come more battery, and weight. Which is yet another trade off that currently isn't in the Surface's favor.
It's really more that the idea of doing an OS X iPad after the ecosystem has had time to mature is basically a non-starter at this point. You are stuck with some form of the "Surface Dilemma" no matter which route you take to an OS X iPad. The best option at this point is to continue to evolve iOS on the tablet, and let it eat away at laptops organically. And find some way to convince 3rd party app devs to bring more powerful apps to the platform more quickly than they are now.
ARM processors running systems like iOS and Android are the future. Intel based x86 processors running systems like OS X and Windows, as much as I hate to admit it, just simply aren't. All the smart companies realize this and are moving with the trend. The people that are clamoring for file systems and trackpads will still be able to use them for a long time, but eventually that stuff will go the way of the command prompt, or it will be adapted differently for mobile.
This has been a hard thing for me to admit since last fall when the iPad Pro came out, but this is just simply where all the money is and where most users want to be. I know it's hard to accept for techies, but techies need to come to grips with the fact that they are not the minority.
Even Microsoft wants to move there. Windows RT didn't work out, but I sense that the Surface Pro on Intel is a transitional product. Microsoft hasn't given up completely on Windows Phone because they think that eventually the "Surface" model will scale down to the phone (i.e. a phone will be powerful enough to use as a PC with a connection to a keyboard and monitor). That's the point of the Universal Windows Platform.
Sounds good in concept, hard to engineer. To begin with, it'll need two CPUs -- one to run OS X and one for iOS.
I'm not asking for an OSX tablet, I like iOS apps just how they are although they can be far more complex with future updates. I just want a trackpad or mouse support for the iPad pro. ....
We would never have any battery life if this was the case and we would have to hear a awful fan kick in to cool the processor...that's going back in the stone ages for me. Look at the Surface Pro 4, barely 4 to 5 hours of battery life.
This may be more likely, but it could be a custom accessory like the Pencil or Smart Keyboard. Gorilla arm (which Steve Jobs used to explain why Apple wasn't pursuing a touchscreen Mac) applies to the iPad Pro, as well. More so to the 12.9" iPad, but also to the 9.7" iPad.
