Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Discussion and support for the Mac family of operating systems.
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Ron2K
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Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Post by Ron2K »

As Gerald Ratner will testify, standing on stage and panning your own products isn’t a particularly effective sales strategy. Yet when Steve Jobs announced last night that he was “going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device”, it wasn’t a million miles away from the “total crap” quip that cost Ratner his job and, very nearly, his company.

Does Apple really want or even need full-fat Mac OS X? The evidence increasingly suggests not. In four short years, iOS has acquired a 16.8% share of the smartphone market, according to Gartner: almost double the 9.3% market share Apple’s spent 10 years building with Mac OS X. On tablets, iOS and the iPad accounted for 80% of all sales in the first quarter of 2011, according to Context. iOS is mainstream: Mac OS X isn’t and likely never will be.
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Yes, it's just one person's opinion, but one can see why he may be inclined to believe that.
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Re: Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Post by DAE_JA_VOO »

About 4 months ago I came up with this theory that Apple will push it's users away from a full OS like OS X and take them more to something like iOS. I would never have agreed with something like that a year ago, but then I got an iPad and it made a whole lot of sense to me. Here's why:

I can do 90% of what I do on my PC on my iPad. The only things I can't do on my iPad that I do on my desktop machine is play specific games. Web/Social/Music/Video, heck I even edit photos on my iPad from time to time, because it's powerful enough to do that, and do it well. Obviously it's not as powerful as Desktop Photoshop, but it's pretty good.

But this is where it's interesting: iOS is INFINITELY less complicated than a desktop OS. There's no filing system, no complicated menus, nothing like that, but I can still get everything done. So why the heck do I need all the bulk and complicated crap in a conventional OS? I don't. Now, I'm a power user, much like 99% of us here on the forum, so an OS doesn't feel complicated to me at all, but man, I look at my parents and they still struggle to get their heads around XP. My mom got an iPad a few months ago and she's got no problems doing everything she needs to do on that thing. The fact that my mom can pick up a device and just use it without struggle says quite a lot about the OS.

So now, with the introduction of the App Store, and with Launchpad, you can see that Apple is slowly moving their OS into something that's less complicated than what it is now. I don't think that they'll eventually have iOS on their machines, but they'll most CERTAINLY be running something similar.

Mark my words - when we're old men and have 16 year old kids, our kids won't believe we used OSes as complicated as the ones we use now. Everything will be dead simple - no complicated file systems, no complicated control panels, none of that garbage.
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Ron2K
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Re: Apple killing off Mac OS X?

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Ett, looks like some more people agree with you...
AppleInsider wrote:Apple is looking to merge its iOS and Mac OS X operating systems into one unified platform for applications and cloud services as soon as next year starting with the MacBook Air, one Wall Street analyst believes.

Peter Misek with Jefferies & Co. said in a note to investors on Wednesday that he sees such a transition possible with a new MacBook Air running Apple's custom next-generation "A6" processor. The theory, first reported on by Barron's, would have a new iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air all running the A6 in 2012.

...

"Our preliminary view is that Apple can use a 32-bit ARM architecture to address the vast majority of the OS X ecosystem's needs in 2012-13 except for high-end professional devices," he wrote. "When 64-bit ARM is available in 2016, we believe Apple will have a single OS and hardware architecture."
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Re: Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Post by DAE_JA_VOO »

Yep. I'm telling you guys - There's seriously no need for Operating Systems to be as complicated as they are, and Apple seems to be the only company that sees this. They'll have to lead the pack in this transformation.
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Re: Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Post by Ron2K »

^^ Mind you, with Microsoft planning an ARM version of Windows 8, they could be thinking the exact same thing. Apple will likely beat them to it though.
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Re: Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Post by DeathStrike »

Well Mac OS Lion is heading more to iOS as it is. its got the app home screen and all that. its pretty cool.
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Apple killing off Mac OS X?

Post by ryanrich »

Yeah after running Lion for a week I could see just how many things have come straight from iOS, and this is only the beginning.

Power users and devs will still need major OS features, but most users just don't...
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