Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshspankit | Hacker News Reader

> Put macOS on iPad, you cowards.

This would finally solve one of my biggest heartbreaks with the iPad...

Not that it would be more powerful (it would be), but that the iPad Pro could run macOS and the “normie iPad” could go back to being a dead-simple experience.

With the iPad 1 and 2 I was shouting from the rooftops “get your parents an iPad, get your grandparents and iPad, get every non-tech person an iPad!”. When it came out it was opposite an overly-complicated industry with the majority of new users being terrified of pressing a button that breaks something. The iPad was a genuine solution to that in a way that nothing else was (and even now almost nothing is, including the iPad).

Let the Pros have macOS and everyone else have an elegant intuition-focused iOS.

View on HN

My read is that Apple would very much like to move in the opposite direction where more people are in a locked down walled garden environment. I think if anything we’ll see macOS slowly moving more toward an iOS experience rather than enabling less lockdowns on apple devices.

I agree that they want walled gardens (it seems like the only thing holding them back is not wanting to boil the water quick enough to make everyone jump out), but they could continue that move just the same whether they put macOS on an iPad or not.

Many FOSS folks that buy Apple instead of supporting Linux OEMs never got the point that Apple never had a UNIX culture.

Macs during System days were as closed as modern Apple devices, and stuff like A/UX were more of an experiment than anything else.

The reverse acquisition of NeXT brought some UNIX culture into Apple, but even then, Steve Jobs always saw it as a checkbook item, a detail to make NeXTSTEP relevant in the UNIX workstation market.

Apple saw it as a survival mechanism to get out of their crash course.

Now that they are better than ever, they can happily go back to 1990's way of working.

> Macs during System days were as closed as modern Apple devices

An important difference is that classic MacOS didn't actively scare users away from installing apps outside a centralized shop controlled by Apple (which didn't even exist back then).

That is the only difference, Mac OS was as proprietary as it could be.

Had Copland been better managed, not even OpenGL would ever got a place on it, rather Quickdraw 3D.

Probably you are right. iOS/iPadOS apps will be everywhere soon. I believe it's already possible to run iOS apps on M-chip macs (I don't have M-chip mac to check it though). So you could just make an iPad app and it will work on both platforms.

The developer has to enable running on Mac, but for those that have they run really well. Most feel perfectly native even though they were designed for iPad.

If you want a customizable experience, apple is NOT what you should buy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com