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Comment by gopalv | Hacker News Reader

The worry is that the person prying it, rather gently, will be Tim Cook.

The only hedge against that is the ecosystem for phone & ipad development is still the macbooks - so it does hurt Apple to take away the ability to write your own apps on a Macbook.

I got a new ipad this week and it is pretty clear that 99% of my non-work life can be lived on it - banks, games and all the streaming apps. I don't have any more collections of DVDs, games or music.

Even writing/drawing is better on a device which I can pick up and sit in a chair to read like a printed document, now that usb-c lets me plug it into my existing setup for screens when I do need a bigger screen.

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According to rumours, Apple has been working on a touchscreen-enabled variant of macOS for the iPad, due for release in 2023.

Hasn't some variation on that rumor been going around for a long time?

I haven't heard this particular incarnation until recently, but [cue spooky panicked voice] "the Mac and the iPad are merging, just you wait" has been something we've been warned about for a decade and counting. I've argued before that if Apple really planned to lock the Mac down to the same degree they have the iPad, it would have happened with the move to ARM-based CPUs and the macOS 11+ UX. The fact that that didn't happen strongly suggests that it's not on the roadmap. I stand by that. (I also stand by my contention that increased security making some things more difficult to do is not being locked down. My concerns about Apple's future directions have to do with services and advertising, but that, as they say, is another post.)

At any rate, never say never, but I would be surprised if Apple releases a version of macOS that runs on iPad hardware, even if it's running in a lab somewhere in Cupertino. I've been half-seriously predicting an entirely new operating system built around Swift and SwiftUI that replaces both iPadOS and macOS down the road, but I don't think that's in the near future -- and stuffing macOS on the iPad in the interim just seems implausible to me.

The other part of the rumour is the 16” iPad Pro predicted for late 2023. Perhaps this “macOS lite” will be exclusive to that model?

The only hedge against that is the ecosystem for phone & ipad development is still the macbooks

And there are any number of ways around that. "Developer mode" iPads that run Xcode and a Unix shell and that start at $5000, or a web development environment that does builds on Apple's servers, or just release the internal Windows/Linux Xcode versions that they almost certainly have.

Fortunately Macs are currently too profitable for them to kill, but that can change quickly.

Some of the Microsoft hardware form factors are interesting.

For example, the Surface Laptop Studio form factor in MBP form would be really nice.

I'd like to use the iPad form factor for managing photos and reading books. But when I've used an iPad, I usually end up wanting a keyboard, so I add one, then I realize I have a MBP that can't do as much.

So to me it makes sense to take a 13" MBP, add touch to the screen, and hinge the screen in such a way that it turns into a thick tablet.

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