MacOS X a dog or just in need of a good bitch slap?

It's obvious. They're going to launch OS 10.7. No question about it. If'in they have any brains it'll be exactly what we were talking about … with a revamped iTunes at the core of the update. Tread carefully Steve Jobs, you have to distinguish iTunes for Mac from iTunes from Windows without queering the latter. I think that the iPad interface for iTunes, flawed though it is, probably has some clues.

Lion's important though. Better figure out what to drop it for. You could also make Lioness, but then what do you call 10.9? Cub? Methinks that the Mac OS morphs into the iOS at 11.30 …

Steve's all about the legacy now. Much as he'd like to run Apple another 20, he's not a well man. Unless he thinks he'll die if he leaves (well, could be, plenty of people are like that, drop dead the next day after they retire sitting on their porch), he probably has an exit strategy within the decade.

I'd say it consists of this… 

Work on Mac OS and converge it with iOS … I think the appropriate launch is with touchscreen Macs. Steve has to rethink the interface to eliminate the mouse.

POTENTIALLY, a mouseless Macbook Air running iOS could be the start. Having used that bluetooth keyboard that JW has mentioned on my iPad, I can see it. The elements are all definitely there plus there's a bit of weirdness that suggests things that haven't been thought out all the way (as in ready for expansion).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2010 03:55AM by bahamut.

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Steve has to rethink the interface to eliminate the mouse.

This worries me. A lot of the multi-touch stuff requires two or more fingers simultaneously - things I can't do.

Aie… Well there's the new order for you. Nobody said it'd be pretty.

There is no excuse for not having AS AN OPTION, at least partial or not total voice command and control in a modern OS dagnabbit!

Voiceover my friend!

Is it that good? Not much fanfare for it.

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bahamut
Work on Mac OS and converge it with iOS … I think the appropriate launch is with touchscreen Macs. Steve has to rethink the interface to eliminate the mouse.

POTENTIALLY, a mouseless Macbook Air running iOS could be the start. Having used that bluetooth keyboard that JW has mentioned on my iPad, I can see it. The elements are all definitely there plus there's a bit of weirdness that suggests things that haven't been thought out all the way (as in ready for expansion).

Not saying you're dead on, but this rings true, particularly the first bit. We've been seeing hints here and there, but without a revamped UI there's no way touch comes to Macs. Such a UI will have to be 90% iOS. iOS Pro might have windows, or panes. The operation modes are so different that running legacy apps would require the OS X environment to take over the screen.

Do we really need another round of legacy apps?

Do we really need another legacy OS hanging on too long?

Don't worry, Jobs will just kill old apps dead after 2 years. FULL TRANSITION TO ARM

I'm not seeing the full Photoshop for ARM any time soon.

Software as a Service.

Since I tossed out the nugget that started this one, let me say this: while I don't believe the new Air will be A4 (that really was just a discussion point), I do believe that the next hardware transition is not only on the planning table, it has real potential to be "silent". In the iDevices, Apple has slowly been recapturing its hardware ownership. A(Nd as I'm writing this, my opinion is shifting slightly, but I'll just slide into the new thought) There might not be a formal transition any time soon for the "Pro" line, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the consumer line do some dancing. Still "silent", though, through translation and emulation. Devs still compile to the Intel target, what's running it underneath becomes a black box, much like the original Macintosh idea and much closer to what the iOS is doing right now.

Can you stretch the hypervisor concept to include a sophisticated UI that can run multiple OS's in multiple windows; a dozen virtual machines running simultaneously?

One UI to bring them all,
One UI to bind them,
One UI to rule them all,
And to Apple bind them.

Oh wasn't that what I said about OS X? Red Box, Yellow Box, cocoa, carbon?

Yes, except a hypervisor is deeper down; all OS's run on top of it. So iOS is a peer of OS X is a peer of Windows, etc.

One problem of that is performance. Hard to program to the metal when you don't know what the metal will be.

Also I use the mac's ability to run windows all the time. Either via Parallels or booting straight into it for steam games.

With a real hypervisor, the performance issues that Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion face *almost* go away, with a few exceptions (raw device mapping/sharing is still one of them from what I can tell).But, for "most people" the HV layer wouldn't be very heavyweight.

And don't forget, there were "morphing" chipsets in the works before, and still will be. Chipset independence that doesn't go true lowest common denominator is something that could be very powerful for a broad range of devices. Look at how the company is putting heavy emphasis on software layers that abstract the hardware. Bare metal programming is not required for very many applications (far fewer than it's actually used for) and Apple knows that.

iOS scrolling? It's a UI disaster. Impossible in a long PDF for example.

If they do this, it's a colossal mistake. http://www.macstories.net/mac/exclusive-ios-scrolling-coming-to-os-x-10-7-white-quick-look-popovers/

First reactions to "Lion" during the "Back to the Mac" event announcement? The attempt to propagate iOS interface elements back into a desktop OS seems, at first blush, like a complete disaster. This looks like yet another round of the kind of Steve's weird UI blundering that began with the first previews of Aqua (with later dev/user pushback likely forcing backpedalling later). Obviously it's early days to conclude this for sure, but this Mac-as-iPad thing looks like a potential UI nightmare in the offing.

"Launchpad"? WTF. They should just call it the fucking Windows Start menu.