On the Apple Tablet, the iPhone and the ARM processor | Hacker News Reader

On the Apple Tablet, the iPhone and the ARM processor

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23 pointspieter8 comments

The most interesting thing I took from this argument was the musing on PA Semi and how they'd tie in. I know at the time they were acquired there were a lot of musings on what exactly the purpose was, but the ARM licensee situation with a custom chip design as described in the article makes a whole lot of sense.

This article makes a big assumption that the tablet will be closely related to the iPhone, sharing the same OS, for example, and being compatible with iPhone apps. This seems to go against prevailing opinion (see Gruber, for example).

I agree with the article. There are three choices for the Tablet: iPhone OS, Desktop OSX or a whole new variant. It makes no sense to me for Apple to expend effort on adapting a whole new OS and Desktop OSX just isn't suited for the tablet environment (which is why they had to adapt a new version for the iPhone in the first place)

Also, does anyone really think Apple isn't looking at leveraging the app store's momentum for the tablet? Many of the tablet stories (most notably the WSJ) have even suggested Apple is actively courting iPhone developers to adapt their apps to the tablet.

So again either they adapted a whole new OSX variant just for the tablet AND went to the effort of having it emulate the iPhone OS or they're just using the iPhone OS. Which one of those sounds more likely to you?

The article's concern over "mobile universal binaries" seems misplaced. I find highly dubious the idea of binary cross-compatibility between iPhone OS and the tablet OS. From form factor to hardware resources, they would constitute two different platforms.

Most likely, XCode will have some affordances for sharing resources between an iPhone project and a tablet project.

    Desktop OSX just isn't suited for the tablet environment

I don't know about that. OS X has had an on-screen keyboard and "ink" capabilities built-in for quite a while. The hand writing recognition is pretty good. Unfortunately, without dedicated Apple hardware, application support has been little to none.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I will be disappointed if an Apple Tablet is released without stylus support. And I'm not sure if that is possible with the iPhone OS as-is (I'm just not that familiar with the SDK).

I don't think the on-screen capabilites of OS X have ever been designed for (multi-)touch screens, but rather for tablet devices like the Wacom's.

Right, but a cintiq that runs an OS would be pretty killer ;)

The tablet may have an entirely different GUI than the iPhone/Touch or OSX but I don't think there's any reason to believe the OS would be a radical departure from Apple's current operating systems.

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