I wouldn't mind if there is some more API convergence (e.g. OpenGL ES and total reliance on graphical layers on the OS X). As of now, there are only two core differences between iOS and OS X: Cocoa vs. Cocoa Touch and more restricted computing environment. The OS codebase is essentially the same. I see no reason for them to merge them further. Have some more homogenisation - sure, as far as APIs and visual style goes. But nothing more.
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Analyst Predicts 'iAnywhere' OS X and iOS Combo Platform Despite Apple's Public Dismissal
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Finally!
I've wanted this for 5 years. Slap my iPhone into a docking station - with a more powerful CPU, graphics co-processors, hard drive storage, wired internet connection etc. - and use it as a full fledged PC with a 27" monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse, etc. Yank it out and take my phone - and my key data - with me wherever I go.
There would be no "convergence" of iOS and OS X, at least not from the end user's point of view. The mobile touch interface would remain radically different from the docked, desktop / laptop experience, as it should be.
With Windows 8, Microsoft tried to force users to adapt to a mobile / touch interface regardless of how the users were interacting with the device. That's exactly the kind of bass ackwards thinking we've all come to know and hate from Redmond. Apple's devices will adapt the interface to the mode of interaction, which is as it should be.
I've wanted this for 5 years. Slap my iPhone into a docking station - with a more powerful CPU, graphics co-processors, hard drive storage, wired internet connection etc. - and use it as a full fledged PC with a 27" monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse, etc. Yank it out and take my phone - and my key data - with me wherever I go.
There would be no "convergence" of iOS and OS X, at least not from the end user's point of view. The mobile touch interface would remain radically different from the docked, desktop / laptop experience, as it should be.
With Windows 8, Microsoft tried to force users to adapt to a mobile / touch interface regardless of how the users were interacting with the device. That's exactly the kind of bass ackwards thinking we've all come to know and hate from Redmond. Apple's devices will adapt the interface to the mode of interaction, which is as it should be.
How is it different from what we have now? You can already share your key data between your iMac and the iPhone via iCloud - no reason to plug anything anywhere.
if the rumored ipad pro is true, that's the iAnywhere device analysts are talking about. the tablet revolution is here.
analysts are *******s
they just say random things and when they get something right they say "i told ya so"
the title said analysts are a - holes with the dash and no s's
they just say random things and when they get something right they say "i told ya so"
the title said analysts are a - holes with the dash and no s's
If I was wrong 90% of the times my business would have been shut a loong loong time ago...
Oh yeah, because Windows 8 has been such a resounding success now that everyone with Windows has a tablet-top with a sum total of zero complaints*.
I can absolutely see OS X continuing the trend towards touch-capability, and maybe we'll eventually get touch-screen enabled Apple products. But I think it'd be a huge mistake to rush any kind of convergence, as Apple has been doing a decent job of making gradual changes thus far.
I could absolutely see the next iOS getting some big new multi-tasking capabilities, but convergence with OS X? Not yet please.
*I just want to note, I don't hate Windows 8, I just think it was a mistake to push touch so hard. As with Vista, the next release (in this case Windows 8.1) is a lot more like how Windows 8 should have been in the first place, with a distinct desktop and touch environment. It should definitely be taken as a cautionary tail about how rushing things is a bad idea though.
I can absolutely see OS X continuing the trend towards touch-capability, and maybe we'll eventually get touch-screen enabled Apple products. But I think it'd be a huge mistake to rush any kind of convergence, as Apple has been doing a decent job of making gradual changes thus far.
I could absolutely see the next iOS getting some big new multi-tasking capabilities, but convergence with OS X? Not yet please.
*I just want to note, I don't hate Windows 8, I just think it was a mistake to push touch so hard. As with Vista, the next release (in this case Windows 8.1) is a lot more like how Windows 8 should have been in the first place, with a distinct desktop and touch environment. It should definitely be taken as a cautionary tail about how rushing things is a bad idea though.
It's a concept that's won Microsoft universal acclaim with Windows 8.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
The concept of Win8 and their mobile platforms was actually genius and a great idea.... it's the released product that is the problem, not the concept behind it.
There is no finesse to it, bad interface.... glaring omission of multitouch features on desk tops that are on phones, etc....
All something I would have thought Apple would have done first, and better.
Exactly. To be fair, Apple always makes statements like this, and then releases that exact thing 4 months later.... Unless something is an existing product, they will deny it till their last breath and do it.
Even then....
IOS is OSX at the core. There is already a sense of convergence, and we've seen if slowly moved into OSX's interface.
We've already seen iLife and iWork blended to be the same on both platforms for the most part....
And the market is dictating this is a must.... just no one has yet to implement it well. Google is on track to do that, and the only company having grow in laptops with a whole new platform that is beginning to implement Android into Chrome..... and Apple and Microsoft are seeing steep declines in pc sales.
Apple just likes to slowly move forward and get the upgrades out there....
I think their words were very carefully chosen.
The iPad no longer holds a 70%+ share in tablets..... the iPhone's share has shrunk.....
I bet money you will see Apple put out a very elegant solution that might not be one OS on all devices, but will trump Microsoft and it will happen sooner than later. I bet they release a pro iPad this year, get the early adopters to buy, and then next year we see a huge leap in both OSX and IOS.
And when Apple really denies something hard, they've historically lied.
Agreed. But I raise your dumb to stupidest.
This has to be one of the stupidest articles I've read.
Is stupidest a word?
After all of these years and people still don't understand how much different and robust OS X is as an operating system that you can't just "port" it to a mobile device?
Based on this assertion, Moskowitz is losing his edge.
I know that apple does have a history or taking things that were attempted in the past and revamping them to be done right... but this one is completely out of the ball park.
A better integration of file sharing across the platforms is something that we can expect to see, perhaps on a more unified front rather than having it scattered through applications.
The question that comes into play is this. Mobile devices have become powerful... To the extent that the geek bench score on my previous macbook that i was using at the end of 2013 was just 100 points above my 5s. So we are going to, in the next few years, see a convergence of mobile capability with what a laptop (entry level) can do...
I can see what Moskowitz says, but we all took the wrong thing from it. I can see this happening, because they already started it with airplay. An apple tv might become a device that can dock and charge an iPad/iPhone and that can make it usable on a television... but the problem here is that Apple still has not given us a solution for a mouse...
I know that apple does have a history or taking things that were attempted in the past and revamping them to be done right... but this one is completely out of the ball park.
A better integration of file sharing across the platforms is something that we can expect to see, perhaps on a more unified front rather than having it scattered through applications.
The question that comes into play is this. Mobile devices have become powerful... To the extent that the geek bench score on my previous macbook that i was using at the end of 2013 was just 100 points above my 5s. So we are going to, in the next few years, see a convergence of mobile capability with what a laptop (entry level) can do...
I can see what Moskowitz says, but we all took the wrong thing from it. I can see this happening, because they already started it with airplay. An apple tv might become a device that can dock and charge an iPad/iPhone and that can make it usable on a television... but the problem here is that Apple still has not given us a solution for a mouse...
Oh please, if that was true, then Canada's economy would have collapsed as well. The Bank of Canada was following the same policy low interest rates to boost economic growth. Yet in Canada, the banks did not collapse and in fact Bay Street emerged stronger. While the recession affected Canada too, largely because of heavy trade with the United States, the recession was nowhere nearly as severe.
The reason Canada's banks did not collapse is that they are far better regulated than their American counterparts. Canada came under considerable criticism in the 1980, 1990s and 2000s for not following the American and European approach of heavily deregulating the financial services sector. The so-called experts criticized Canada's policy of keeping banks heavily regulated. They argued that it meant that Canadian banks were not investing has heavily in emerging markets. But those regulations which prevented that so-called "investment" also prevented the collapse of the Canadian financial services sector.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/business/28views.html?_r=0
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Not that it's likely, but ....
I could actually see a future iPhone that still runs a version of iOS when you use it by itself, but would allow inserting it into an LCD display with keyboard and mouse, and suddenly become the "brain" of an OS X computer.
You'd have to beef up both the processor power and the RAM in the phone, but that doesn't seem too unreasonable a goal, at the rate they've been upgrading the ARM processors.
Essentially, I'm thinking you'd design the device so it has both operating systems inside of it. I imagine iOS shares a lot of low-level core stuff with OS X, so there's probably some code you can use for both purposes in the same unit? But I'm thinking it would give a full OS X experience in the "docked" mode, except allow shared access to the data folder used on the iOS side, so you could still play iTunes music that's saved in the phone, open/print any saved documents, etc.
I could actually see a future iPhone that still runs a version of iOS when you use it by itself, but would allow inserting it into an LCD display with keyboard and mouse, and suddenly become the "brain" of an OS X computer.
You'd have to beef up both the processor power and the RAM in the phone, but that doesn't seem too unreasonable a goal, at the rate they've been upgrading the ARM processors.
Essentially, I'm thinking you'd design the device so it has both operating systems inside of it. I imagine iOS shares a lot of low-level core stuff with OS X, so there's probably some code you can use for both purposes in the same unit? But I'm thinking it would give a full OS X experience in the "docked" mode, except allow shared access to the data folder used on the iOS side, so you could still play iTunes music that's saved in the phone, open/print any saved documents, etc.
It does seem that way. I've always seen it dismissed as lazier programming, but like you say, the features aren't really changing much with many of them, at least not the features I use so why the crappy performance other than to drive hardware sales. I mean how is it a C64 could run word processors and spreadsheets with its 8-bit 1MHz processor and a whoppipng 64kilobytes of ram (calculators from the '90s had more memory by far) but today's Office software requires a dual-core 32-bit/64-bit CPU with over a GB of memory? Really? I guess what is more amazing is that people put up with it and don't complain a bit. If no one would buy bigfoot software, they'd have to do a more efficient job, but no one seems to even question why Office needs a modern computer when basic word processing hasn't changed much since the '80s except for WYSIWYG (at least not the kind of word processing I do).
Even the Internet has gotten out of hand. My beefed up PPC 1.8GHz G4 with 1.5GB of ram could handle the Internet just fine right up until around 2009-2010 and then suddenly everything started feeling slow as hell. Keep in mind my Amiga 3000 from 1991 could handle most web pages up until 2000 or so. WTF are people doing with web sites these days that a simple text page has to load 10MB of data and take a Core2Duo minimum to render in under two minutes time? My 1st Gen iPod touch...you might as well give it up. You'll sit there all day trying to surf even basic pages.
Part of the problem is all this ancillary crap (literally garbage you'd just assume not even load) that has NOTHING to do with the web site you're on and everything to do with tracking, advertising and social links, votes, etc. organized on pages that used to load with "frames" in a few seconds and now update to move the ads downward as you scroll, etc., that takes much more CPU power to manage. Got more CPU power? Let's shove some more ads at 'em with 3D effects or track them with more advanced garbage so we can sell more ads....
Sorry, but people seem to think that because OSX is "using" ram that it's "hogging" ram. It's not the case. I'm not saying Mavericks is more efficient than Mountain Lion or Snow Leopard, but I am saying that if you have an 8GB ram machine that it's NORMAL for OSX to be using 96% of it at any given time. It's using for caching and other non-critical operations and releases it when a program asks for it. Otherwise, it's a total waste to have all that memory just sitting there and doing absolutely nothing when it could be speeding background tasks up or whatever and using the hard drive less. Now that's not to say Mavericks is doing a good job at that, but it's not hogging more memory in the sense some people think it is. My 4GB MBP uses a similar percentage as my 8GB Mini. It has nothing to do with slowing the thing down or requiring that much memory. My MBP is using 3.09GB at the moment and I just woke it from sleep. I'm only running Mail and a browser. But if I start Logic Pro (which can use everything you got if you can spare it), it has no trouble starting or using multiple gigabytes of memory. OSX releases it for Logic Pro to use it. But meanwhile, I have ZERO swap. Everything is being cached in RAM so it's faster.
BS, you don't know what you're talking about. ...Which is probably why you're arbitrarily pointing to Canada instead of arguing against my basic points. You think gambling without a government backstop is so popular? Go to a roulette table, put all your money red and lose your freaking shirt. then tell me about how we need to regulate so people can't put all their money on red because the casinos are run by evil greedy capitalists. Whatever.
Apple executives say a lot of things that end up not being the truth. Like the "we'll never make a smaller iPad!" claim, which obviously was the truth.
I thought at first that Mavericks was using the RAM more effectively by caching, but it's noticeable slower. Yes, caching is good, but Mavericks seems to either do a bad job with it or require more RAM for actual usage ("active" rather than "inactive"). Everything is just very clearly slower on my desktop and laptop Mac under Mavericks, everything has more active memory and even more CPU usage (though CPU usage isn't a problem for me), and it hangs sometimes when it used to always be smooth.
If you run Snow Leopard on one machine with 2GB of RAM and another with 4GB of RAM, the system uses a lot more RAM, but it's also faster. With Mavericks, it's more like "you need at least 8GB of RAM or else your computer sucks". I'm unfortunately stuck with 6GB of RAM on my 2008 Mac Pro because I'm unwilling to pay the super-high premium for fully buffered DDR2 memory.
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On a 2011 2GB RAM MBA.
movin to Mavericks is slower. sometimes Noticably. Many things that used to be instant take a few seconds now to load. Things like Chrome, VLC are no longer instant (VLC takes 5-10 seconds now to load to an empty playlist).
I also get the beach ball frequently. it doesn't necessarily change the interaction with the programs, but every few seconds while the system is processing anything, the Cursor changes to the beachball for a split second then back.
Something that never happened under Lion or Mountain Lion.
I will likely be going back to Mountain Lion next time I decide to wipe and cleanup the Macbook Air.
Mavericks didn't bring enough actual features to the table to warrant the upgrade and a degradation of performance. But it was free!
I originally wrote a big rant in response about how much I feel your pain, but forget it. I'll just say that I can't stand all this new web programming crap and social networking features and leave it at that.
P.S. If you're sick of Google's search results giving you a redirecting link instead of a direct one that clogs up your history with useless URLs, there's a Safari extension called GDirectLinks that gets around that.
And who's still using core2duo's in their systems?
The A7 has a long way to go before it catches up with the latest i7 processors. The problem is that it has to gain a ton of processing power without requiring more battery or generating more heat. By the time it does this there will have been several updates to the i7 or its successor, leaving the A7 (or 8, 9, or 10) still too anemic to replace a laptop/desktop for many uses. Merging the two platforms will remain a fool's errand for a long time to come.