This year, Mac apps are no longer eligible for the Apple Design awards
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
In a few more years, as this new generation of mobile matures, Apple will probably shift back to the desktop as the pieces begin to drift together for the next generation there.
So one could argue that OSX does not need as much hype to spur development, and since it has been around for so long, many of the critical gaps in the application space have been filled on OSX. Whereas there are still many opportunities for mobile device applications that solve problems that are not yet solved.
That sounds like the mentality that had people stuck with Windows XP and IE 6 for years on end with no innovation in the space.
The 90-9-1 rule says that 90% of people are going to be consumers/audience, 9% will interact/edit/participate, while only 1% will be doing the actual creation of content for people to interact with or consume.
The desktop Macs are for that 1%. In fact, most computers have been designed to cater to that 1% of coders and creative professionals. Very few computers have been explicitly designed and made for the other 99%. The iPad seems to me to be targeting that 90% that want to be an audience/consumer of content, but are not creators. It's a computing device/appliance finally made specifically with them in mind, rather than with hackers/creators/coders/geeks in mind as the target market.
So, it makes sense that Macs will remain the only way to develop for iPhone OS. Making iPhone OS capable of becoming a development platform would be counter to the entire idea/market of iPhone OS.
Macs may dwindle to 1% of Apple's sales some day, but they'll still sit at the top, trickling down all the content to the rest of the ecosystem.
Imagine a world in which Apple never created the Mac, but had instead been formed many years later, with the same people, processes, and design ethic. They'd still have become successful at selling iPhones, iPods, and iPads; nothing about those devices really depends on the Mac legacy, except for the fact that their OS happened to have been developed for the Mac first. In that world, if you walked into Jobs's office today and pitched him on the idea of launching a line of traditional personal computers, he'd say something sarcastic and tell you to GTFO. The idea wouldn't merit five minutes' thought.
Hence the company's new name, sans "Computer."
It makes as much sense for Apple to have their own line of proprietary PCs as it does for Sony. Even Sony understands that.
I am hoping for more attention on OSX as well, but I'm not really worried. The ADA are usually targeted on specific (and new) technologies, and the latest technologies like OpenCL and GCD are more useful from a behind-the-scenes-perspective.
I can also imagine the plan being a convergence of the two platforms so that they'll put back some of the new thinking in the iPhone OS into OSX. It wouldn't have made sense to base that work on iPhone OS 3.0 when 4.0 put in as much new stuff as it does. Although, admittedly, a lot of that stuff is already available on the desktop.
Sure that's not the whole deal, but still.
When they renamed the company from "Apple Computer" to "Apple", it should've been obvious which way the wind was blowing.
They are not going to be selling Macs in ten years.
Our computing environment is going through another refactoring. The last big refactoring started with the rise of the web, and its not done yet. The next wave started with the rise of powerful mobile internet devices, and will still be playing out in a decade.
What will we all be coding on in 10 years? Hell if I know, it could be retinal projectors, and neural implants hooked into "the TouchCloud." Or maybe its something running a descendent of the iPhone fork of OS X with full support for huge displays, keyboards, mice, etc.
As mentioned above, though, Windows-hosted development is the rule and not the exception in other industries like game development, which are just as technically demanding (if not far more so) than iPhone OS app development.
{edit} Either that or they are banking on being so entrenched by the time they drop the Mac platform that developers will have no choice but to 'walk barefoot over broken glass' to develop for their mobile platform.
Based on their recent policy changes that is exactly what they expect.
Jobs would sell his own liver if that's what it took to own the market he's playing in. (Actually, that might explain a few things...)
He cannot, and will never, own the PC market with the Mac. Vista was his last chance, I think.
OTOH, the portable music player market is a foregone conclusion at this point, and he can, and may, dominate the smartphone market as well, through the incompetence of his adversaries if nothing else. Most great platform success stories -- certainly Microsoft's -- have come about in exactly that way. MS didn't win their Windows and Office monopolies because their products were awesome, they won because everybody else was a goddamned idiot.
It's way too late to defeat Windows. Jobs knows that, and the prospect of continuing the battle must bore him by now.
They are not going to be selling Macs in ten years.
Apple sold 2.94 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter,
representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarterPeople were also saying that 10 years ago. It's hard to predict the future.
I tell you, if Jobs could get away with running OSX as an App Store orientated platform that can only run pre-approved apps, he would. :(
There are some customers which we chose not to serve.
We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a
piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.
- 2008
We didn't think we'd do well in the cellphone business...
We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA. - 2003
There are no plans to make a tablet...It turns out people
want keyboards. - 2003
I'm not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny
little screen. - 2003Suppose the hardware wasn't there in 2008 (which I don't think is strictly true, but OK). Are you really saying that Steve Jobs, with all his secret meetings with Samsung and random manufacturers, isn't aware that it will be available soon?
To put it another way, if the hardware is hard, wouldn't it have taken Apple quite some time to build the stuff? Wouldn't they be working on the iPad, say, two years out, when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?
But I think even that argument in a sense is a red herring. The real issue is "can Jobs change his mind?" Of course he can. But he's notoriously cryptic about what Apple's working on. It's not like he's out talking to industry analysts and is making off-the-cuff comments about Apple's strategy. His statements are calculated and controlled. In fact, I would argue that he is more often "wrong" or "misleading" about new products than he is "accurate", because lots (by percentage) of his forward-looking statements turn out to be inaccurate, at least according to the plain meaning of them. To say that he is changing his mind is to imply that he's really inept his job: figuring out what to build.
But I think even that's not the central issue. Let's say Jobs is just a really whimsical guy, who doesn't know he's working on an iPad until it slaps him in the face on launch day. So all of the quoted statements are just him running his mouth and he really has no product vision years out.
Wouldn't that imply, then, that today Jobs has no idea whether he'll be making a Mac app store or not? So his statement has no real information content?
tl;dr It doesn't matter whether the hardware is hard or what his intent is--to mislead or if he simply doesn't know he's going to make a product. His track record shows that claiming he's not going to do something is a good indicator that he'll do it a few years later.
when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?
He wasn't. Here is the original transcript from which your first quote was pulled. It is not about tablets, and only by implication is it even about the idea of an "Apple netbook", the prevalent rumor of the day.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein
And then you had also mentioned the price umbrella statement and you said look, certainly to be successful on iPhone, we don’t want to create a price umbrella. I think in response to another question, you also talked about extraordinary feature functionality in terms of your Mac products. Do you have the same philosophy around Mac as you do with iPhone, that you have to be careful not to create an umbrella in each? So I guess the simple question is should we continue to see more affordable price points across the Mac product family and across iPhone going forward?
Steven P. Jobs
Well, I think what we want to do is deliver a lot, an increasing level of value to these customers. There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve and there’s a lot of them. And we’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect us to stick with that winning strategy and continuing to try to add more and more value to those products in those customer bases we choose to serve. Does that make sense to you?
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein
Yes, it does. I mean, I guess, if I could follow-up, you did in this case add more value in terms of feature functionality with your notebook by actually lowering the price, so you retained the features but lowered the price. Certainly in terms of the new notebooks, you retained the price and added more features.
Steven P. Jobs
Correct.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein
Can we expect you to continue to attract more customers by doing both, both adding more features at the same price and lowering price and retaining the same features?
Steven P. Jobs
Well, we like to attract new customers but you will just have to wait and see.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/100980-apple-f4q08-qtr-end-9...
They started working on the iPad two years before they released the iPhone :)
My point was that of course they've been working on it, but it was not possible to have completed it and released it in 2008. If it had been, some other company would have done it; so far though, both with phones and with tablet computers, Apple hardware (at least in the US, not talking about Japan) seems to be right on the edge of what is possible - all the modern touch-screen phones [droid, pre, nexus, motorola, etc] started coming out after the iPhone release; same as we will now see with all the new tablets.
Of course one could argue that the other manufacturers just weren't sure of the market, and only rushed in to fill in the gaps after Apple has proven that there is a demand for that kind of hardware, but I don't think that's realistic - if it was technically feasible for HP or Microsoft to release a kick-ass tablet before Apple, I'm sure they would've jumped at the chance. They hadn't.
As to changing his mind - that was referring to his statements from 2003, and I am saying that in that time his statements were reasonable. Just because 7 years passed doesn't mean that he has to stick by them.
Anyway, this is getting too long. Just thought your statements were strangely harsh.
Are you going to be Open-Sourcing the iPhoneOS...
In the very tautological sense that it wasn't "possible" until Apple did it, yes. In the sense that we've made some great discovery which has somehow encheapened the silicon, no. It's hard to do because design is hard, not because the tech wasn't there (although there have certainly been tech improvements).
> cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most
The iPhone just about doubles the pixels for (on many devices) approximately the same screen area. Is it better? Yes. Is it revolutionary? Hardly. And anyway, Jobs' purported objection was not to the resolution but to the physical size.
link - http://www.macstories.net/news/steve-jobs-no-mac-app-store/
His response was "Nope." And everyone appeared to be in a frenzy saying "No app store for OS X" when in reality that does not actually shoot down the possibility. Since the question takes the conjunctive form, his nope could be to either one of those statements. Everyone assumed it meant no app store for OS X, but it could just as well mean that there will not be a requirement of Apple authorization to run apps on OS X.
A minor technicality, I'm sure, but I would not be the least bit surprised to see an App store on OS X, just not the authoritarian, single point of app installing beast that is the iPhone/iPad app store.
As a Mac developer, this feels like a major blow. Sure, I understand that the iPhone OS stuff is the new shiny and the spotlight is going to be on it, but lately it feels like Apple is just coasting on the Mac side. It makes me seriously question if I'm writing apps for the right platform.
If it's time to reevaluate platforms, then it's time to take a look at all the possibilities again, not just the ones made by Apple. The iPad looks great, but then again, so does the web.
Looks like the scientific computing poster session has been dropped this year too.
I really don't like the deemphasis of OSX in favor of iPhone OS. The iPhone is great for mobility because it strips computing down to the core, but it has a LOOONNGG way to go before it can toe up with OSX or Windows when it comes to productivity, IMO.
ps. I'm a mac fanboy at heart, but i try to remain objective about consumer technology for the "masses". Outside of the tech ecosphere, the world is a very different place.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/01/windows-7-grow...
how many iPhone apps actually feel delightful to use and don't just look pretty?
Maybe that's too harsh. Web browsers helped move things along for a while, as did 3D gaming. But really, a UI with windows and a pointer that I interact with using a single mouse and keyboard is pretty played out.
But yes, highly improbable.
I can understand a lessened focus given how popular iPhone and iPad are right now, but the shunning of Mac apps completely from the ADAs makes me think we'll see a Mac-only conference soon.