Thoughts on iOS Pro
The future of the Mac?
This week Apple released the new Shortcut app beta to developers to try out and with all the other changes in iOS and MacOS lately I made me think about where all of this is going. I just don’t see MacOS being Apple’s main Mac operating system for another 20 years, nor do I see iOS 12 being remotely able to replace it anytime soon. I feel like whatever Apple does it will be in stages, starting with Project Marzipan. With Marzipan, Apple is working on a framework to port iOS apps to the Mac. You can see this in MacOS Mojave’s Home, News, Voice Memos, and Stocks app. Right now only Apple has access to this engine, but sometime next year they are going to open it up to 3rd party developers as well.
The current version of UIKit, the framework for MacOS’s application user interface, is not going away, but over time AppKit is going to be ported to the Mac and I imagine, over time, improved. This is particularly interesting because there have also been rumors for a few years that Apple is considering dumping Intel for ARM chipsets, like what is in their iPhones and iPads. I feel like that when they decide to do this it will start with the MacBook, a machine who’s Intel chipset has already been outperformed by the iPad Pro’s A-series chipset for years now. I think that the “Pro” line of Macs will be Intel-based for the next 5–10 years, but I think that with the MacBook, we’ll see an iOS Pro layer. Much like how the Apple Watch, AppleTV, and iPhone all have their respective user interfaces, I feel like the Mac will get a version of iOS that looks and acts a lot like the current MacOS with its floating windows, dock, notification system, terminal, menu bar, etc, but the underlying architecture be running on ARM and running iOS Pro. I can see MacOS eventually being supplanted by iOS Pro over the next 5–10 years as applications like Final Cut, Logic, iWork, etc are rewritten for iOS.
Having iOS Pro run on the Mac could also introduce some interesting hardware scenarios that you only see in Windows-land right now, namely laptops with removable screens to be used as tablets like the Surfacebook 2, laptops that rotated all the way around to be used as a 2-in-1 like the Lenovo Yoga, and large-screen touchscreen desktop like the Surface Studio. It would also allow for accessories like the Apple Pencil to work with the Mac professional apps like Creative Cloud and maybe for Apple to release something like the Surface Dial, a unique and useful tool that Microsoft has for the Surface line for computers.
Overall, I don’t feel like the Macintosh is going anywhere because I think traditional computing is here to stay for a while, but I do think with time it will begin to work and feel different from the operating system that we’re using today. There are probably going to be a few bumps along the way, but I’m excited where things could be going.
