I guess the latest published article MacRumors "Apple's Greg Joswiak: No Plans to Merge Mac and iPad" clarifies the situation.
Let's be clear, I'm not saying there's no sense or good ideas in what you're stating. I'm just saying: "
unfortunately it's not gonna happen" and this was yet another time confirmed by Apple in the above quoted article.
I was inferring it before, but, more clearly, if iPadOS, as a brand, becomes attached to a what we would today consider a tower type device with 15 M4 chips that runs the iPadOS version of Final Cut Pro and other, by that time, professional iPadOS apps (like Logic Pro, etc.) why does there need to be a macOS?
Plenty acceptable responses to this. I'll just write some.
- System admin controlling their iMac Pro computers need admin tools, a terminal, so on so forth
- iPadOS means Apple store, on macOS you can install any apps. That's both mandatory for tech companies developing such apps and people who use them
- macOS is an open system meaning you can tweak it, change it to some extend, build bridges between apps, etc. whereas iPadOS is a sandboxed system where apps can't communicate directly with each other
- macOS is a windowed system, you can have different windows open at the same time to multitask and this is crucial for many situations, iPadOS is not even close to achieve such multitasking performance
- to some extend you can bring some changes to macOS itself; for instance macOS ships with a certain version of a tool X, but you can change that or make it use another tool instead that does the same job. You can add some core functionalities to the system that were not already present initially. Can't do that on iPadOS.
Thing is, you could probably implement all these examples in iPadOS, but by doing so you would completely go against iPadOS' nature. You'd need to rewrite from scratch to make it something it was never meant for to begin with.
For example, iPadOS is meant to protect users and one thing it does to achieve this is "sandboxing" which is the exact opposite of what macOS allows. In other words, what I'm trying to say is that iPadOS and macOS are not only different at the moment, they are
opposite one to each other on some aspects. This makes it impossible to conciliate both at the same time.
The things that are currently considered shortcomings for iPadOS are software problems…that can be resolved by software solutions.
Following what I've just written, some shortcomings are
not to be considered as problems. "it's not a bug, it's a feature." This sentence sounds as "a good excuse" at times, but it is also true at other times. There's no "solution" to a feature, it just is.
Apple has clearly shown a lot of focus in incrementally improving iPadOS, gradually bringing more and more previously macOS features to iPadOS.
Yup and that is actually what will go on happening imho: Apple will bring pro softwares like Logic, FCP, etc. to iPadOS and will encourage other companies to do so/keep doing so. Adobe PS is one example, I wouldn't be surprised if in X months/years Photoshop on iPadOS has 100% the same functionality as its macOS counterpart, even one unique code base for both. I can already hear you (or some) saying: but what's the use of macOS then?
=> It's not just a question of having the
same apps, the same
level of apps on both macOS and iPadOS. Both system do not differentiate one from the other from the apps themselves, but from the
environment on which these apps are running. That's the key difference.
Hope that help you or others who are not too much in tech aspects/deep OS functionalities.
