This is a wild ride - interesting to see how far apart they are. If Apple was planning on ever running OSX on iPads and time soon, you'd imagine that some of these differences would have been smoothed over already.
What happens when multi-touch with hand-eye coordination is required?
My Mac runs a Nintendo DS emulator fine, but it sure is a bitch for a game like Scribblenauts, or any game requiring drawing precise shapes or letters - because the input was designed for a stylus, not a mouse or trackpad.
Also; the distance between the input device (mouse) and the output appearing on a monitor in a different locations make playing a handful of DS games in an emulator an awful representation of the actual experience.
While I get I can probably run Instagram or whatever, I’m just curious as to how they handle all these flaws with porting multi-touch heavy apps - a huge cornerstone of iOS devices. Just wondering how they handled that. :)
https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/04/21/the-mac-and.html
My argument from there is that Apple has been demonstrating a consistent philosophy since the start of the iPad:
- Macs are general purpose computers
- iPads/iPhones are application consoles, analogous to game consoles
That philosophy doesn't preclude securing macOS in annoying ways, but it does preclude locking down macOS like iOS. The notion that Apple would force all Mac apps to be installed from the App Store because it would increase their revenue simply doesn't hold water, because, as I noted then, the Venn diagram of "users likely to walk over such a change" and "users likely to spend boggling amounts of money on Apple hardware" is close to a perfect circle. Even if that's only a few percent of those high-ticket users, that's literally millions of lost unit sales.
Furthermore, I stand by my thoughts then that if Apple was ever going to try such a radical move, it would have been last year, with the introduction of Apple Silicon and the relatively radical redesign brought by macOS Big Sur.
The flip side of this philosophy, though, is that we're probably not going to ever see iOS open the way macOS is any more than they must for technical, market, or regulatory reasons.
My suspicion is that in the long run there's a new OS that will replace both macOS and iPadOS, and at that point, all bets may be off. But I don't think we're going to see that within the next few years.
These are dividends to be reaped at a later date. And the inability to secure software and hardware systems will be the ultimate justification.
The great irony in all of our endeavors is that if you make all of your decisions in an effort to avoid becoming something, you just wind up taking the long way around and backing into being the thing you didn’t want to become in the first place.
See Google:Evil, Apple:1984, Microsoft:The Borg, Larry Ellison:A Lawnmower
And the list of individuals who became what they most despised is quite long as well.
My suspicion is that the computing industry as a whole is inching toward an everything-in-the-cloud, ubiquitous computing model, and the vast majority of users will see this shift as a net benefit, not a net negative. I'm not convinced that simply projecting what we have now forward a few years is what that will look like, though.
And we can see it happening. macOS is getting more iOS-like with each new iteration.