This was the original premise of the Smalltalk Model-View-Controller architecture. (Not to be confused with web MVC, which reused the name for something else.) The “Controller” in Model-View-Controller refers to the input device, and a given Model can have multiple independent Views and Controllers. The “Model” is supposed to an object that’s a semantic representation of the underlying thing being manipulated.

One of the visible impacts of MVC is that changes occur in real-time: you modify a value in a dialog, and everything affected by that value instantly updates. This is already common in Mac apps (in contrast to Windows apps, which typically want you to press “ok” or “apply”), so it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple was already using a modern MVC variant. It’s a well-known pattern.