Comment by westhom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by westhom | Hacker News Reader

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>The incentive for Apple to do this would be what: do extract a little more revenue from their smallest-volume OS?

I think that's only part of the picture. Yes it would boost their services business, but Macbook/iMac users are a small part of the picture these days. It's smarter from a technology centralization standpoint. Why have almost all your products centered around iOS codebase, and then your laptops/iMacs (small % of total devices) on legacy OSX. A better strategy would be, use a single OS codebase, and add layers of functionality the bigger / more pro a device gets. Makes it way easier to advance the software for your entire product line.

Btw, expanding iOS to Macbooks/iMacs does not mean throwing pro / dev users under the bus. They can think of a way to make "iOS-macOS" appealing to devs, by simulating some of the OSX features, like terminal and the ability to write software on-device.

> A better strategy would be, use a single OS codebase, and add layers of functionality the bigger / more pro a device gets.

That is the strategy that they have used since the original phone announcement (Jobs touted it on stage). Supposedly there were two competing phone teams, one built on a mac os X base and one on the ipod s/w. I don't know any of the people involved so I can't say how true that is, but it feels a bit weird to me, like the kind of thing that would have been decided pretty early in the process.

In any case there's a large percentage of common code base between the oses on phone, ipad, watch, tv, and mac (and a bunch of embedded devices too, like the usb-c and lightning dongles for HDMI -- yes you can open a console to those devices if you want).

What I think is great is that a bunch of ios frameworks now work/have equivalents on the macOS. I'm actually pretty happy for the same capabilities to be roughly available across platforms: back in the 80s the hardware I used (lispms mostly) was pretty much all a computing "window" into a common underlying sense of computation. I use the apple devices because they are getting pretty close to that: I can just pick up the device that has the most convenient interface for task X, or if that's not possible, still do task X with the device at hand.

Having said that what sucks is when the mac application is just a lazily ported ios app that doesn't fit the mac UX metaphors. But this release looks like a good step forward in that regard.

I'm not sure if I recall correctly but I thought the ipod-based iphone was more to have some of the engineering teams contribute to certain parts without expanding the number of people that needed to know the top secret parts.

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