Predication/theory for the future

[KoolAid-Drink]

This predication is not rooted in reality, nor is it any knowledge, but I was thinking... the future of all Apple OSes.

macOS 11 is obviously a transitional OS, a bridge between the past and the future. Big Sur supports both "legacy" Intel systems and now the new Apple Silicon/ARM processors. In many ways, Big Sur reminds me of Mac OS 9, which was "classic" and a bridge between the true classic Mac OS and Mac OS X in 2001.

My suspicion/theory is that Apple will release macOS 11, next year macOS 12, and so on, until 2025-2027 or so, keeping Intel support while phasing out/decepreating older APIs bit by bit, and transitioning all system applications to Catalyst. Then, in one of those years, Apple will start 100% fresh, from scratch, with appleOS 1.0, which would be scaleable from the Watch/whatever smallest technology device Apple has at that time, to the Mac. appleOS would discontinue support for Intel 100%, and would be unified, running on only Apple Silicon processors (which all devices should have by the time).

This move would make sense, given that iOS would be nearing/at iOS 20 by then, and it'd just be redudant and weird with the different naming and numbering. It'd make sense just to rebrand all OSes to appleOS, especially as they'd all run on the same processor anyway. By then, I'd guess that most/if not all applications on macOS would have been transitioned to a more mature Catalyst, and integration between all devices would be much tighter.

What do you think?

 

[cmaier]

If by transitioning to “catalyst” you mean transitioning to UIKit, then, yes, I think that’s the way things will go. Though I don’t think it will make too much difference to users. UIKit is not very different than AppKit, and UIKit has slowly but surely been adding sdks from AppKit (either identical, or cleaned up with similar functionality). This allows ipads to do more and more of what macs can do, for example.

And we have seen that the “look and feel” of AppKit has morphed, once again, this time to be more similar to iOS. So I think there will be more and more similarities between the two systems.

That said, given the huge overlap between UIKit and AppKit, while some things in AppKit will be deprecated (after all, that happens every year anyway), I don’t see this as anything at all like the OS 9 transition (which was much more complicated - classic mac was not really the same thing as carbon, so you had classic mac apps porting to carbon, which was pretty easy, and at the same time you had cocoa. And it wasn’t clear at first whether cocoa would catch on. And cocoa was VERY different than carbon/classic mac. (You also had the weirdness of actually running OS 9 as an app within OS X). So you phased out classic mac, and then, eventually, carbon when the 64 bit transition occurred.

So I see two differences between then and now. First, carbon and cocoa were very very different, so there was a huge benefit to get rid of one - a lot less work for apple’s developers, get rid of inconsistencies between the two, etc. Second, the 64-bit transition was a huge motivator to get rid of carbon. Even though apple had carbon 64 working, the fact that old apps would eventually have to be ported to 64 bit either way gave them an excuse to ditch carbon 32.

This time, most of the AppKit/UIKit code is shared, and the sharing is only increasing over time.

The issue I am curious about is whether AppKit/UIKit will continue to be exposed to developers 10 years from now, or whether everything will be SwiftUI. I hope the “kits” will continue to be there, based on my experience with Swiftui, and I see little advantage to getting rid of the kits unless apple thinks the whole world will move to wearables, but we’ll see.