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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I’m still very skeptical of the “Mac that can run iOS apps” concept. Tim Cook has been pretty unambiguous in his statements about Mac vs iPad.

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-m...

>We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad, because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.

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Of course this is from 2015, and it’s possible they’ve been prototyping for years and think they can overcome the fear of a subpar device.

But as a former Surface Pro owner who now has an iPad Pro, I don’t see that happening. The iPad is immeasurably better as a tablet when you have tablet-oriented software available. And when you don’t, obviously the Surface’s compromise of “have a crappy desktop experience too” is usable if you need to have that option. But it’s not good compared to stuff designed for a tablet.

Similarly, the chunks of Windows 10 that are clearly designed for touchscreens (like the new Settings app) are not great on a desktop compared to the older and still more powerful control panel. More consistent, sure, as any ground-up redo would be, but the information density of things like the Add or Remove Programs list is awful compared to what it was before.

I don’t think Apple is going to make those compromises. They might do a more converged developer backened for Mac and iOS to make it easier to target both platforms, but they won’t shove the frontends together.

> I don’t think Apple is going to make those compromises. They might do a more converged developer blackened for Mac and iOS to make it easier to target both platforms, but they won’t shove the frontends together.

This, I think, is the most accurate picture of future iOS / Mac convergence. Universal binaries that present either a desktop, tablet, or phone UI based on where they're running.

Microsoft's mistake was trying to converge the desktop and tablet UIs.

They already have one App Store where a single purchase gives you a cross platform app with a different frontend across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

Unifying the Mac frontend into that ecosystem just seems like the obvious conclusion.

I don't know that they'd strictly be the same executable, but at least as far as the user is concerned they would be the same piece of software. From a developer perspective, multiple UIs built with slightly different flavors of AppKit depending on the UI paradigm, including the Mac which is currently targeted by AppKit.

This doesn’t work for professional apps, many of which are a collection of work areas controlled by tens or even hundreds of menu options.

iOS doesn’t handle that kind of UI well.

There’s also the cost issue. All but the most exotic iOS apps cost less than $100. Many professional apps cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

It’s not just a fundamentally different market. The products are fundamentally different in critical ways.

I can imagine a hybrid MacPad product - maybe a dual-panel clamshell - but if it’s done badly it would be the worst of both worlds.

I auspect it could a succesful replacement for the iOS product line, with dual MacPadOS and iOS support.

But I can’t see it working for professionals without a lot of breakage.

I don't see it taking over for everything necessarily, but there are a lot of places it would help. Like Paprika Recipe Manager, which costs $5 for the iPhone/iPad universal app, but if I wanted the Mac version it's $30. Part of that is a "because I can" pricing, the market will bear it because there's just not that much competition compared to iOS apps. Another part is "because I have to," it's a much smaller market and a bunch of additional work to make the Mac version, so the price has to cover those costs with fewer users.

If it didn't need a totally separate UI framework, ports like this would take less effort and more apps would do it. Maybe you can't sell it for 6x the cost any more, but a comparatively small amount of work gives you a leg up on the competition.

Twitter is another example. They killed the native Mac client earlier this year and said "For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web."

Microsoft has been trying convergence for years and have been awful at it, but there are finally some real implemented concepts like modifying the task bar based on tablet/desktop modes. Realized at scale I still think this strategy could work and with Apple's tight control over the iOS software landscape there is some hope of having iOS as a second-, class citizen on mac OS.

Apple has a long history of being strongly against things right up until they actually do them. And i think there's a significant difference between a converged iPad and MacBook, and a MacBook that is still primarily a laptop that runs MacOS, but can run iOS apps as a sort of bonus feature and consolation prize for incompatibility with existing Mac apps.

It's also worth noting that when he said that, Chromebooks didn't run android apps.

Apple has a long history of saying one thing and doing another (I don't blame them; the "Elop effect" is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platfo...).

They may never release it but no doubt they have it. There are iMacs in Cupertino running macOS on ARM and there are iPads running macOS. During the PPC transition it was pretty obvious that Apple had been building OS X to work on Intel for a while secretly.

It's not like it was a big stretch: Mac OS X came directly from NeXTStep, which had already been ported to Intel wayyyyy back in the NeXT days.

Which means it's not a big stretch for iOS, either, since it's built on top of MacOS.

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