Sigh... if their analysis is correct, and it seems to me Arstechnica is almost always correct, it really, really saddens me if Apple is sort of abandoning the Mac lineup for the iOS line up. Even though I no longer have an OSX machine, I still feel very fondly for that OS. :-(
I only got my first Mac about 12 months ago and I am really liking it. I too would be really sad if they leave OS X and it's traditionally associated hardware to languish.
Oh well, I guess I could always go back to Linux or BSD for my primary workstation.
And why would they do that? So everyone who develops for their one (iOS) platform must do so on someone else' OS? That would be a brilliant strategy.
Right now when you develop for iOS you're going to have the best experience on Mac with XCode. But as part of that, porting your app to e.g. Android probably means a total rewrite. If you had to use e.g. Linux for developing iOS applications then it would be easy to write in some language and have the IDE have different phone backend targets. Do you think Apple would like that?
1) I don't think anyone ever claimed Apples was discontinuing OSX, just that it seems clear that it's taking a back seat, both marketing and engineering wise, to the iPhone/iOS line of products.
2) If Xcode did run on Linux or Windows, that wouldn't reduce the lockin between Xcode and iOS. The inability to write iOS applications in a higher level language and target different phone backends has absolutely nothing to do with XCode running on OSX, and everything to do with the iPhone developer agreement specifically preventing you from doing so.
