I am really not liking the whole emphasize-iphoneOS-over everything-else direction of apple recently. I like OSX a lot. I really hope they return to giving it the attention it deserves soon.
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.