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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried they won't transition MacBooks to these CPUs, but they'll just let the entire Mac lineup gradually fade to black with intermittent refresh cycles and dead end features like touch bar.

I can well imagine Apple expecting people to plug in a keyboard and monitor to their iPad Pro, while it gets thinner and thinner.

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While "intermittent refresh cycles" are certainly a thing for the Mac line recently, I think it's important to distinguish "new features that seem to be flops" from both "no new features" and "not caring about the Mac line." The Touch Bar may or may not be a dead end (I don't hate it the way many other people do, but if it went away I wouldn't shed a tear, either), but it represents a significant amount of engineering work put into a Mac-only feature. So does the love-it-or-hate-it† "Butterfly" keyboard. And the new ARM-based T2 chip, which handles tasks from encryption to signal processing to being the SSD controller, is also obviously significant engineering -- and again, Mac-only.

I don't doubt that Macs will eventually fade into the sunset, but I don't think it's coming nearly as quickly as either pundits or pessimists seem to believe. "Marzipan" may indeed be a first step, but I think it's going to be a Carbon vs. Cocoa situation, taking many years to fully transition. For iOS to supplant macOS, it has to essentially do everything macOS does. It doesn't have to do everything the same way, but if it's going to be a full replacement for a general purpose computing platform, it has to be, well, a general purpose computing platform.

†Technically, "grudgingly-tolerate-it" should be in there, but it doesn't flow well.

Just a note on the T2: it's a variant of the A10, more specifically, it's basically an A10 running a custom operating system (BridgeOS) and with the high performance cores disabled. There might be other modifications, but it isn't the kind of thing I would hold up as a triumphant piece of Mac-specific engineering. Not that it is a bad piece of silicon, just repurposed silicon isn't the sort of thing I would put stock in when it comes to the importance of the Mac to Apple.

The TouchBar was a good example though, even if it didn't receive the warmest reception on the market, it is still a good piece of Mac-specific engineering.

I wish they would take the touch bar idea, and apply it to the trackpad instead of the function keys…

Re-purposed engineering can still be triumphant.

> I can well imagine Apple expecting people to plug in a keyboard and monitor to their iPad Pro, while it gets thinner and thinner.

And at some point, Apple will introduce an "iPad mini" with no display

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