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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

And nearly twice their per-unit Mac sales for the quarter.

Ten years of work on OSX barely shifts the needle; less than a year of iPad sales breaks the gauge. It's pretty clear which OS is more important to Apple now.

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"Ten years of work on OSX barely shifts the needle; less than a year of iPad sales breaks the gauge. It's pretty clear which OS is more important to Apple now."

It's unfortunate, but I think you're right. OS X is BY FAR my favorite Apple product (even over the hardware, which is beautiful, but seems to be trending down with regards to quality). iOS is the money-maker though; Apple would be hard pressed to not see it as the future of the company. Boo.

Dear Apple,

I don't want iOS on my desktop. I want OS X on my desktop. Please.

Apple isn't putting iOS on the desktop. It wouldn't look right, feel right or work right. They will however be incorporating some iOS ideas into OS X. I really do believe that they'll do it with a careful and steady hand.

I really hope you're right. The demos I saw of Lion scared me a bit about the future of the OS. I was hoping for some new features/refinements, along the lines of tabbed Finder windows, better Spotlight, and Resolution independence. Instead, I saw iOS looking menus, and not much by way of features. That caused me to be concerned about the direction of the OS. My main concern is that an "iOS direction" may remove and simplify, rather than supplement and improve.

I should disclose that while I love OS X on my desktop, I have the robot in my phone.

EDIT: Added a sentence for clarification of my concerns.

There's not a whole lot to gain by making the desktop increasingly iOS-ish. Most of the iOS advantages don't 'fit' quite right, the existing base would scream, and the market they'd theoretically be chasing with said changes will have been happily working on their iPads for years.

As far as convergence goes, what I'm starting to wonder, is if it wouldn't make more sense to add a docking solution to iOS instead. After all, Moore's law is bringing desktop-class power to the iPad far faster and more convincingly than any case for iOS style interaction on the desktop is being made.

So the question then arises, whether it would make more sense to support a docked iOS 'mode' -- allowing use of desktop-style app UI and interaction (keyboard/mouse) in native iOS apps -- or just run OS X virtualized when docked (with some shared file bucket between the OSes)?

For what it's worth, Motorola Atrix does basically the equivalent of the latter.

Keep in mind the fact that all you know about OS 10.7 is what was announced at the 'Back to the Mac' event--which was specifically highlighting aspects of iOS that are being carried into OS X.

I guarantee there're are lot of other improvements to be seen, come summer.

I've gone full circle in the last few years regarding my choice of desktop. I used to love only Linux. Then I bought a mac, and thought OSX was the shizz.

But more recently, I've been tending to use Linux more, and more and more.

I'm not sure if it's because Linux has gotten better, or because OSX has just enough quirks to be annoying. (eg: launchctl, Apple Python).

OSX is probably the best consumer / business desktop in existence. But personally, I'm falling in love with Linux again.

You should spend some time w/ FreeBSD.

Care to elaborate on why you feel that way? I'm not a BSD user, but I am interested in why you might feel it a good alternative to Linux or OS X.

Same here. With things like Spotlight and iTunes, OS X was feeling increasingly bloated. Combined with the somewhat weird development setup I found going back to GNOME better.

> And nearly twice their per-unit Mac sales for the quarter.

However, Mac sales are also up and the record number of Mac were sold this quarter.

Hum, they sold mor Macs then ever before, and they make a pretty good margin on them. I would say the needle is going upwards quite nicely.

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