Hacker News Reader

> I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon

Seems unlikely. From a 2016 interview:

> MacOS is meant to be operated with a mouse and keyboard. Apple says it doesn’t make sense to lean forward to touch your Mac screen. An iOS-powered iPad works best with fingers, which means you can just lean back while using it.

> “We did spend a great deal of time looking at this a number of years ago and came to the conclusion that to make the best personal computer, you can’t try to turn MacOS into an iPhone,” Schiller says. “Conversely, you can’t turn iOS into a Mac…. So each one is best at what they’re meant to be — and we take what makes sense to add from each, but without fundamentally changing them so they’re compromised.”

--https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/does-the-mac-still-matt...

The split view of 'producer' vs 'consumer' often seems like a good yardstick for this kinda stuff, rather than high/low end.

For situations where you want to be productive on a device, mouse and keyboard, desktop, big screen, proper seat all very important. For situations where someone consumes on a device, touch input, portability, small screen, headphones connectivity.

That seems to match the philosophical split for MacOS vs IOS, and maybe future developments can be best predicted by applying that lens.

Why is that a useful framework, though?

I've never met people that fall squarely into "producer" or "consumer", everyone you talk to has a creative hobby or three, and might be either a "producer" or a "consumer" at different times of day, or different moods, or as inspiration strikes.

It's a wide, diverse spectrum turned into a strange false dichotomy that leaves us with weird pseudo-categories like "prosumer" (and "conducer"?) middle grounds.

Maybe there is something about enforcing that dichotomy in leaving them to different contexts, different devices it forces you to switch hats in a physical visceral sense. Certainly studies say that such a forced context switch can be good for the brain to know it's time to X where X is produce or consume (or "prosume"?). Yet that seems a strange reason to force that on users. Is it anything more than an equivalent to "It's good for you, you must eat your vegetables before dessert?"

I naturally flow between consumption and production use cases, so why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?

It's an interesting philosophical split, but I'm curious how useful it is in the real world. Microsoft's "everyone can be a creator, everyone should be a creator, your devices should support you whatever you decide to do on the creation/consumption spectrum" reaction marketing seems the better approach to me, philosophically. I'm not defined by a "consumer" or "producer" 'gender', and I don't see why I should be.

How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?

>Why is that a useful framework, though?

>why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?

Mostly because, in my opinion, every attempt to create a device that does that has resulted in failure, and those failures are due to fundamental opposing priorities with each 'mode'.

I may of course be wrong, in which case you're right this framework should be junked. But so far nobody's cracked both use cases well with a single setup, and the model holds. IMO.

>How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?

For a brand that's betting so heavily on the walled garden, ecosystem-based sales and marketing methods, having an 'answer' to every consumer need is essential to is to not have an answer for one of your customer's needs, ecause that opens the door for that customer to adopt something outside your ecosystem. Keep them within the curated suite of products you offer, and keep them happy, or you'll see attrition. Note all of the noise about the latest MBP devices and how they're no longer meeting the needs of many content creators, to see how tricky this can be.

As a coder I don't want to sacrifice usability, price, and / or power to get a flexible device like this. I have an iPad specifically for the chill out and consume experience. It has great battery life, lower power consumption, some simple games, and less distractions.

I don't need my car to make me toast either (not intended with snark, just an extreme example).

Apple sees (and hopefully continues to) an actual divide even if the edges are a bit blurred. So the question here is whether or not the tablet needs to exist as a category... and I think it does, at least for me.

A counter argument against this view, would be the heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people.

Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture...

> Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture.

I would describe it more like a model. And yeah, those never capture the whole picture, and don't need to to be useful.

> heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people.

You can do creation of stuff on iPads, of course. I use it a lot as a very-portable writing machine. But still, I think that marketing was just... marketing. Every one wants to think of themselves as creators, and their kids to be doing things rather than watching YouTube, but still iPads are mostly used for consumption and are much better at it than at creation, except for a few jobs/hobbies.

A better counter argument, for me, would be to just watch a non-technical person use a Windows PC. Many would be better served by a safer, simpler iOS on a 20-inch screen with an ok keyboard.

We wouldn't, because we want a more-than-just-ok keyboard, and many windows, and bash, and a many-core CPU that is great at virtualization, and...

Infantalizing "non-technical users" just means you avoid creating new "technical users", does it not? If "we" all sit in our high and mighty many-core bastions, and leave the masses to shiny, locked down "consumption only devices" outside our gates while we look down upon them, we create a nice closed walled garden, certainly. But is that really the sort of class system we need?

I don't want to infantilize users either, but I do want to give them the right tool for the job. Some people are core users and want powerful tools. Some are ring[1] users and want simple tools to quickly and easily do simple things without having to develop a core competency.

[1] Ring User is a Jared Spool term for non-core users--they are in a ring around the core. The Core/Ring more useful model than Expert/Novice, because expert conflates expertise in the tool with expertise in the domain area. https://articles.uie.com/multiple_personalities/

It's such bullshit. I've done development work on touchscreen Windows laptops and it's very handy. Just the fact that you can touch the mobile simulators just like you touch real devices is super useful. And for some reason Apple has no problem having people lean in to touch their useless MacBook keyboard touchstrip thing. I don't know what they're smoking at Apple these days.

I can understand how having a touchscreen helps with mobile development, but I have no use for touchscreen functionality in my development. I don't have a desire for my macbook to have a touchscreen at all. Further, I think the touch bar was a huge mistake. I've really gotta side with the idea of letting a desktop/laptop excel at being a computer rather than suffering from an identity problem.

All that said, we all get to vote with our dollars :)

Just because you don't have a use (today) doesn't mean that no one has a use for it, much less that you wouldn't find a use for it tomorrow.

Touch on a laptop screen is a huge convenience, it's not a laptop identity problem. Sometimes tapping or scrolling a thing feels more natural, even on a laptop, even on any other screen that you own. Apple has used that very logic in their own marketing of the iPhone and iPad, that touching things is the more natural feel, that directly interacting with things on the screen is quite natural.

To a child growing up with iPhones and iPads, a screen without touch is "broken".

For an adult me, switching between a Windows laptop with touch to a macOS laptop without one takes a bit of mental gymnastics because I keep wanting to just tap the shiny icons to do things and I get briefly confused why the screen is broken when I try to touch them. I don't care how good you think a trackpad is, it's still sometimes faster to reach up and poke something with your pointer finger than track a pointer the long journey over to a thing. It's a nice convenience to have touch on the screen and do it directly.

Maybe that convenience doesn't interest you, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that convenience doesn't exist. (Plus, when you get into differently abled people you start to find people that that convenience starts to matter a lot more for their day-to-day happiness.)

I don’t really disagree with what you’re saying. I realize my viewpoint on this topic was Very selfish. But that is why I pointed out that we all get to vote with our money.

The problem, for me at least, is I don't want anyone smearing their greasy fingers on my display. I like seeing things on a clean display so I would never buy a laptop with this "feature".

This, very much - it's one reason I've never bought a tablet; they always look so gross.

They also said iPod would never do video...

And that iPad would never do stylus...

But Mac will never do touch, because they said so...?

Exactly. The best way to take Apple is to take what they say is gospel... and ignore it completely.

If you had listened to Apple, the iPhone would forever be small enough to operate one-handed, the iPad would never go above or below 10", etc etc. All of that was true until it happened, and suddenly it was the best thing ever.

It seemed a pretty strong statement to me, compared to some off the cuff remark.

"We don't ever see video in the iPod's future. Nobody wants to watch movies on that small a screen."

"If you see a tablet, and it has a stylus, then somebody did it wrong."

Fairly strong statements, too.

Not as strong as stating they researched it and found it didn't work. Those sound like off the cuff remarks to me.

If only MS had realised this when releasing Server 2012 - I remember how awful that was because they had tried to do a touch interface on a server. Things have improved quite a bit but its still a mess

Touch UI on a server? What were they smoking?!

The theory, as explained by a Microsoft employee at the time, was that you would be remoting in with your tablet from wherever you happened to and thus needed a touch interface.

I would like to explain to that techie how remote desktop connections work, and what full-screen refreshes do over poor connections... Not to mention the joys of having "kill this production server" buttons right next to "important app" buttons when working through daisy-chained remote sessions onto low-resolution desktops...

MS always had the funny notion you'd need a GUI to manage your server. By now, I think it's mostly pride and an unwillingness to admit a good command line rules that scenario.

And I'm not talking PowerShell here. That thing is more a scripting language than a shell.

Well, they have the iPad Pro with keyboard cover already. Who's to say that they couldn't make that into an actual laptop product, replacing their lower-end macOS devices?

Also, none of your quotes mention the impossibility of making an iOS device with yet another different form factor. It merely says that they won't merge the two OSes. Plus, even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be the first time that Apple went back on a public statement while rebranding the backtracking as the invention of a whole new computing paradigm.

not an apple user, but can you get unix commandline tools on iOS like you can with termux on Android?

Yes.

2016 is a long time ago in tech terms. Given that they've just announced that iOS apps are coming to OSX, I would be very surprised if touch-screen Macbooks aren't on the way.

I've used touch enabled laptops for quite a while, and it's absolutely a good interface for many things I do as a developer. I'm sure I'm not going to use it on my desktop machine because the screens are about 1m away from me.

Actions speak louder than words. They’ve barely done anything with macOS in years.

Change for no good reason (Windows 8?) is worse than little change (APFS, minor updates). My Gnome desktop is basically unchanged for a good couple major releases of Linux and I'm still very happy with it.

Yes, the things I want from an OS in order of priority are security fixes, bug fixes, support for new hardware, performance improvements, usability enhancements then finally new features.

>They control the iOS-based world in a way they could never control "computers". They're trying to get as many people as they can into their new Disneyland-ish ecosystem, where everything you do is approved and monitored and everything you buy is bought through them.

This sounds so dystopic. I hope that being able to publish software without having to bow to a gatekeeper won't become a thing of the past.

Not just "publishing" software but even writing private software for your own, and your friends' & families', devices is something we can't take for granted. For personal and (private) family use, I gave up on trying to do native apps for iPhone and decided to learn how to do whatever was possible with web apps.

And if iOS Safari (Apple's "gatekeeper" of last resort) falls too far behind, I'll take myself and the whole gang I serve as "IT installer, fixer, and advisor" for right out of Apple land.

Then better switch to a free UNIX clone.

As Mojave is getting iOS security model, Windows is merging the Win32 into UWP, ChromeOS and Android are turning into one OS, and who knows what they would do with Fucshia.

What do you mean by “Mojave is getting iOS security model”. What I’ve seen announced is that, as of 10.14, the system will ask the user when an app first wants access to, e.g., microphone or camera. Do you mean something else?

Is a bit more than that.

macOS is getting a new security runtime, the scope of Gatekeeper will be expanded, entitlements will be required for all security critical OS areas, application signing and registration even for apps distributed outside the store.

For Mojave, it will still be opt-in, later versions depends on how it will received.

"Your Apps and the Future of macOS Security"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/702/

They don't refresh the hardware aggressively because they just flat out don't need to. It's not about running down the Mac, if that was their aim they wouldn't have spent tons of engineering resources on the redesigned super-slim MBPs with new keyboard design and brand new whizzy touch bar. Those features may or may be problematic or even flat out mistakes, but they're not a sign of lazy lack of focus.

The thing is the vast majority of Mac customers don't know what a clock speed is, don't know the difference between RAM memory and Flash memory, and don't care, and are buying these things by the truckload. Apple has always been tardy about hardware updates. It looks like right now they really have actually dropped the ball, and at last they recognised that with the Mac Pro. However all the actual evidence points to this is simply a miscalculation, not a conscious choice.

> The low-end Mac seems to only matter now as a source of low-end users, who need carrot and stick to move them off Mac and onto iOS

Cheapest price for a prepaid iPhone SE right now: £244

Cheapest price for a Mac Mini right now: £479

...define "low-end"?

[Prices from Google Shopping]

The Mac mini is a great machine for iOS development; I do all mine on one.

They feel so slow though, do you find that? I use a late 2014 model as a build machine. It's a Core i5 2.6 Ghz with 8 Gb RAM and a regular HDD, and it takes ~20 mins average to build a not very large Unity game. The last build Xcode took 7m 45s and exporting the IPA took 9m 17s. I haven't profiled where all that time is going yet. Maybe I should have sprung for the Fusion Drive and i7.

I concur.

I’m completely convinced that my 12 inch iPad Pro blows away my 2014 Mac mini in every respect. Mac mini has 8GB ram, and an SSD. Still doesn’t feel nearly as snappy as my iPad.

My 2010 MBAir is even worse.

Get an SSD in there. It'a not too hard to fit it yourself using an iFixit guide.

Mine's late 2014 too (2.8 i5 rather than 2.6) but the Fusion Drive makes a massive difference - can't recommend it enough. (That said, I'm not using Unity.)

Yeah thanks I think I'll stick in an SSD. It's not even the Unity part which is particularly slow though, it's the Xcode and exporting to IPA parts.

What about the low-end Mac (e.g. the Mac Mini) as a "dip your toe in" approach to inviting developers into the macOS/iOS ecosystem? That's always what I understood it as before—it was never an HTPC, and regular users always preferred either AIOs like the iMac, or notebooks. The Mac Mini was specifically the "you already have a Windows workstation, now unplug it and plug its peripherals into this to try out developing on a Mac" experience.

I have one - let me see, a mid-2010 - sitting under my desk. It's my media server, primarily, but I use it for other bits and pieces. It's useful to have an always-on Mac in the house, given that my primary machine is now a MacBook Pro.

It got an SSD a few years ago, prolonging its life. It's probably been turned on for 90% of the time since I got it. Current uptime: 26 days.

If they release an update, I'll probably buy one.

> I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon

Doesn't this already exist as the iPad Pro? Multitasking was introduced with the product line. They even heavily pushed the keyboard and pen.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJYR2LL/A/smart-keyboard-...

I use my ipad pro as a laptop replacement. It works better than I expected except for a few quirks around keyboard support in apps like safari and aws workspaces which are irritating enough to make coding bear impossible.

But in many ways its better than a laptop, especially around note taking and reading.

For most content dev, especially media creation, productivity is proportional to screen area.

The iPad Pro is fine for limited tasks, including simple media creation. But there’s no way anyone is going to want to edit a Hollywood movie or record and mix a complex album on one.

This is a good summary of what can be done with an iPad Pro.

https://paulstamatiou.com/made-on-an-ipad-pro/

It's pretty in line with your opinion; just a lot more detail.

> The high-end Mac users have a better story, because Apple needs developers for their ecosystem, and those people need good tools. I can't imagine Apple being interested in developing dev tools that run on non-Apple devices

They could turn macOS into an exclusive dev tool for their ecosystem. Currently it's basically the main dev platform for rivaling ecosystems like the web, and the companies in that space that compete with Apple.

A switch of the desktop architecture (they already announced that this will happen in the coming years) might enforce the apptore on iOS as well, and destroy the homebrew and third party scene.

Disneyland is fun! What’s wrong with that? Most people aren’t doing anything more than having fun with their “iToys”.

I like having fun and I love my iPad. I only ever touch a computer at work and that’s the way I like it.

It's fun but you can't leave the park. If I want to install a 3rd party app on my $1100 iPhone without using the App store i'm shit out of luck. I think it's unacceptable that if I'm paying that much for a phone I have to go to a different brand to get that freedom and flexibility. The App store is great but the consumer should have a choice to install apps without it despite the potential dangers. As an adult, if I want to install a Youporn or casino app on my phone I don't need Apple telling me that's not allowed.

That level of lockdown is a feature. I would like more freedom and control in iOS too sometimes, but I've gotten used to it. I'm still on my first iPhone (6s) and I'm happy with it for what it does. Contrast this with Androids. Every vendor has their own variation of the OS, APIs are inconsistently implemented across devices, and it's a good bet that the phone will stop receiving OS upgrades in 2 years.

I don't think iOS is perfect by any means, but I take Apple's Draconian measures along with the the long term stability and higher app quality. It's the best mobile OS on the market for me. I still won't get the iPhone X because of the price and face ID replacing touch ID. I'd probably pay to replace the battery and use this phone for another 2 years. It's nice that I can reasonably count on that.

Well it's not a feature for me. Not sure how allowing vendors to install apps onto iOS without the app store (and having a few warning popups) has anything to do with OS fragmentation on Android. Isn't it an interesting coincidence how those 'draconian measures' you mention that are so great have a side effect of being really, really good for Apples business.

I pay Apple $800 for an iPad so there won't be Youporn or casino apps in their app store. Either go to Android (no clue what their free for all store allows) or visit the website.

The closed system is what I want and I'm happy to pay a premium for it.

You agree with what is presently censored are you sure that this will always be so?

If you want a few players to control the gateway to most future communications and culture so that your kids will have to work harder to see boobs online then i question your judgment.

> You agree with what is presently censored

Yes

> are you sure that this will always be so?

No

> so that your kids will have to work harder to see boobs online then i question your judgment.

I won't be having kids but thank you for worrying about them.