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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now.

The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be shifted to be the ones living in the emulation layer like Classic OS9 apps to eventually be removed completely.

If you think I’m wrong, forget your own opinions and prejudices to iPad and walled garden computing and imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.

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> imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit.

You are correct, one of those is not like the others, but it isn’t the Macs. According to their latest earnings report, iPhones made Apple $39.57B, iPads $7.37B, and Macs $8.24B [0]. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPadOS and MacOS merged in the near future, especially since they are running on the same chips, but it won’t be because iPads are the ones making all the money.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/27/apple-aapl-earnings-q3-2021....

>According to their latest earnings report, iPhones made Apple $39.57B, iPads $7.37B, and Macs $8.24B

These are just device sales right? You have to remember iPads have the App Store revenue and the cream scooping of IAP/subscription revenue of most applications running on them.

Apple doesn't get a cut of my Photoshop subscription on Mac, it absolutely gets a cut when I buy Procreate on iOS.

Apple is getting services revenue on the Mac.

At least half the Mac GUI Apps I use are delivered via the Mac App Store. That number moves towards 100% for my non tech friends.

I continue to use iCloud because I have a Mac.

I use a Mac, in tech, subscribe to no services, and do not use the Mac App Store. There, now you have one more data point.

In this case if the Epic lawsuit is successful and drives down the 30% Apple cut it may save macOs as an open-ish platform.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but my key question here is: how will Apple handle lower-level development cases? It's not difficult to imagine a watered-down iPad XCode shipping, but what about the tooling they use to build iOS itself?

After all, Apple has to use something to develop iOS, and I think it's unlikely they'd create a special in-house operating system for the exclusive use of their OS development teams that's totally different than what they ship to consumers.

Why are you assuming iPadOS wouldn’t support low-level development?

I'm sure that they could just use Linux for that. I wouldn't be surprised if they're using Linux right now.

Almost all Apple engineers use Macs.

I’ll believe it when Xcode runs on iPad OS without comprise.

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