Mac OS == iOS?
One of the most famous quotes attributed to American writer Mark Twain is “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” The Mac OS team in Cupertino must feel the same way today. The complete emphasis on iOS at WWDC this year gave pause to many tech pundits to wonder if the Mac was dead, as foreign to this modern age as punch card driven computers were to mine. To some extent it is true that mobile is superseding the traditional desktop/laptop market. Let’s face it, my two year old iPhone 3G has more than enough power to satisfy 90% of my day-to-day computing tasks. And yet, I still find myself sitting at my MacBook to do a lot. The convenience of a large screen, keyboard, and pointing device are undeniable.
So as we look forward to tomorrow’s Mac-centric event at Apple we’ll see a bit of the current and may be a peak of the future. I don’t expect any huge surprises from Apple. I’m of the mind that an OS convergence is inevitable. The common ancestry and kernel shared by Mac OS and iOS would make such a move easy, affordable, and again put Apple at the forefront of computing. Remember that totally touchscreen Mac patent Apple put out earlier this year? That’s not going to be announced tomorrow. Two years from now? I think that is only the only way to go from here. Tomorrow we’ll get Mac OS 10.7; which won’t be a radical change from Snow Leopard. The UI should essentially be the same with some tweaks to make it more iOS-like as a lot of tech blogs have been suggesting. Apple might even introduce touchscreen support (that glimpse of the future) in the confines of the current interface much like Microsoft introduced it inside the confines of Windows 7 without actually changing the interface paradigm.
Will Mac OS == iOS? Eventually yes but not tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll get some MacBook Airs (but at 11.6” it’s more like a MacNetBook Air) and a great new operating system that made me glad I didn’t go buy Snow Leopard when I wanted to. The change is coming and we may see a little of it tomorrow. One of Apple’s great marketing ploys is the phased release and Mac OS 10.7 is Phase 1 in the Master Plan. In three years when my iMac is simply a touchscreen and a wireless keyboard interfacing with an OS that looks and behaves like my iPhone, the Master Plan will be complete.
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Posted on Tuesday October 19th
