I hope this is a sign that Apple is going to focus more on their desktop experience, if only because there aren't any new/hot/rumored devices to release.
Apple also has it's own tick/tock of releases, between developer features and end user features - 10.4 and 10.6 being the former, and 10.5 being the latter. Thus, we're probably going to see a lot of new whiz-bang end user features in 10.7.
"Unification" already exists - iOS and MacOS X core OS and kernel code is fairly similar, as is much of the userland API. It's different for obvious reasons (many to do with touch/hardware limitations), and unless those differences go away (which I don't see happening - touch on an iMac form factor = serious arm pain), I don't see much point to the talk of unification.
Which is probably as much driven by the fact that the air hasn't been updated in quite a while as it is by any facts. But who knows, it will be true at some point.
It's not for everyone but the current generation model has a few design features I really like. The keyboard is inclined so the front of the machine is almost flat on your desk. I find this more comfortable than the square front edge of the MBP. The screen is noticeably less glossy than the current generation MBP. All of the ports are enclosed under the latch which prevents those awkward finger-in-the-ethernet-port moments. For the Rev B/C models they are dead silent and run very cool. The MBP can become quite loud when the fans kick up. The weight difference is not so important when it comes to having it in your backpack but if you want to easily lift the machine with one hand it's noticeable. I can hold my MBA with my left thumb/index finger and touch type with my right hand comfortably.
It happens to me more than I'd like. I carry around my MacBook naked so my fingers tend to be close to the ports a lot. I might have to sit it down and pick it up 2 dozen times a day. Awkward is probably not the right word though. More like painful. It was a bigger issue for me with the old plastic MacBook because all the edges around the ports were surprisingly sharp. The first-gen non-unibody MBP wasn't nearly as bad though because they had nice rounded edges. Not too sure about the new unibody MBP designs since I haven't used one for an extended period of time. Another thing that occurs to me is the MBA design is a bit closer to the iPad or iPhone 3G where the bottom is rounded just enough to make it easier to pickup. I know it's a total niche product and these are very minor things in the grand scale of the universe. Personally I think it's Apple's best industrial design to date. Glad to see so many elements of it in other products.
I love my Air. At the time I bought it I was consulting and travelling. I wanted a personal laptop that I could take with me everywhere to work on my side projects that didn't weigh down my laptop bag. My work laptop was a beast, so the second laptop needed to be light as hell. Then the Air came out and fit the bill perfectly.
There are other reasons I love this machine but they are largely personal preferences. I for one hate really huge, heavy laptops with wide screens. I like that the Air is very comfortable on my lap. But I also own a desktop, so my laptop can be used as just a laptop and doesn't need to be a desktop replacement.
Some people in academia I know use it, and it really suits them. It types like a real macbook, but weighs 2/3 of a normal macbook. For traveling around and such, it seems very practical.
The Air was half-way to the final simplicity of the iPad—if they had knocked off the bottom half of it, that would have been what everyone had actually pictured the iPad as before it was released. I don't think it really has any place in the modern product line, lying in an uneasy position somewhere very near "iPad with the keyboard dock attached."
I don't agree. I think the advantage of iOS devices is that they're instant on "appliances". Air is more of a computer with no moving parts, i.e. a full computer but many of the benefits of instant on. I think that will have a place until SSD gets to the point that it's a viable option on the pro line.
Additionally, some big APIs from iOS have been (or look to be) available in both OS's. CoreLocation and AVFoundation, at the very least. And the multitouch framework on each OS is very similar, even if the prefix isn't. It wouldn't be too hard to abstract that away, if one needed to.
I can add that the Mac API needs a little bit of polishing now. I just went back to develop a Mac application (for internal use) after developing on the iPhone, and certain things are not that intuitive or easy to use as on the iPhone. Is not really a big difference, but Mac API could use a little more consistency learned from the iPhone API.
What's interesting to me is how similar the MBP touch pad is to a touch screen. I don't know how many touches it can keep track of, but it's at least 4...
I'm hoping the next version of OS X will finally bring us true resolution independence, to correspond with some high DPI "Retina" MacBook displays.
I also expect they'll provide new ways for developers and/or users to leverage both iOS and OS X; perhaps that's where cloud computing will come into play.
Other than that, I don't think we're going to see any more huge innovations in desktop computing, from Apple or anyone else. All the action is in mobile (and development tools).
I can't help but think of "640k should be enough for everybody" when I read this. Desktop computing isn't as sexy as mobile computing, but it isn't dead yet. There are plenty of innovations left to be made.
This is fair, but I also think about an essay I read (from Kevin Kelly? It might be in his new books, _What Technology Wants_), in which he points out that, basically, we've hit a plateau of about 60 MPH landspeed for most journeys. If you chart a graph of "how fast people get around on land" from 1715 to about 1950, you see a steady rise. After that, you just see... us being steady.
Ditto for air flight: from the dawn of aviation to about 1960 or 1970, you see steadily increasing speeds. Today, most planes still fly at about ~500 MPH (I think), just like they used to.
Although there are still lots of micro-innovations going on with cars, rail, and planes, they've basically hit a maximum airspeed.
I suspect something similar might be going on with the current paradigm of desktop operating systems. Since around ~2005 (when Windows XP's service packs finally caught up to virus / worm writers and OS X Tiger brought stability and full text search), nothing in operating systems has made a tangible difference in my life.
Compared to the jump from DOS to Windows 95, or from 95/98 to XP, or the late versions of Mac OS to the early versions of OS X... the current changes in operating systems just aren't that great. Which isn't to say "consumer OSes are dead"—but they've probably hit a spot where the major problems have been solved. The innovations are smaller than universal protected memory, fast, full-indexed search, and the like.
The key words above are "for this paradigm." Mobile represents the next obvious computing paradigm, and that might be a good thing. For better or worse, Microsoft has "won" the desktop and will probably never lose it. The company appears to mostly be competing with itself these days (I say, writing from an iMac).
It's interesting to see this stated now, right as Google is moving forward with automated cars. Once all highway traffic is automated we can push to much higher speeds safely (and drive much closer to each other).
Yeah, mobile is great and all (I say that as I type this on my iPad) but there is still much that can be done with larger form factors and more powerful devices. But then I'm the guy who still doesn't understand why no one even tried to come up with ways to use two mice. Imagine using one hand to grab and hold, and the other to manipulate. It's not like we haven't had USB for over a decade, and both Microsoft and Apple make and sell mice. You'd think that doubling e market would be attractive.
Two mice means two cursors, this would require window managers and the UI libraries on on of them to be largely rewritten. As they have been, for the mobile space.
Multitouch in desktop OSes has been tacked on as a layer over the traditional cursor-oriented APIs, which is why it feels that way when you use it.
You are probably not familiar with some niche markets in engineering and 3D design, where this is part of day-to-day operations. Check www.3dconnexion.com for more info.
This 60mph landspeed limit isn't true in non-North American countries. High speed trains are a reality in many other places, where they actually invest in infrastructure. And let's not forget the German autobahn (where I recently drove 125mph for more than an hour at a time… sweet!).
The big problem with trying to reinvent the desktop are the billions of computer users around the world who rely on having a familiar experience. Even with Apple's tiny slice of the market we see Internet riots over things like the iTunes icon changing or the OSX menubar becoming transparent. It's hard to see a time in the future when people will have any appetite for radical changes. Maybe it could happen on a platform like Linux where you can easily switch desktop environments but there's not much hope for third party applications embracing change.
I think this is eventually going to change. The new UIs are touchscreen pads, netbook editions etc. that just don't scale to the traditional desktop user interface.
The next thing is that people get used to more modal, one-at-a-time multitasking systems like Android and then some variant of a netbook UI really hits off, eventually on desktop as well.
Apple didn't put a mouse driven UI on a tablet. Why would they put a touch driven UI on a computer? Jobs has said he views PCs are trucks. Based on that statement I think 10.7 is more likely going to be about keeping the truck drivers happy.
Apple didn't put arrow keys on the first Mac either. A couple of years later, they did. You know why they waited? Because they wanted to make sure apps that were written to take advantage of the new UI, rather than ported from purely keyboard driven UIs. Why would they put a mouse UI on their first tablet, particularly when Microsoft has demonstrated what a mediocre result that gets you.
I see no reason why, having established touch UI patterns on iOS devices, Apple would have any reason not to start introducing such things on the desktop.
And really, have you been in a pickup lately? They have a lot of car like amenities, like antilock breaks, air conditioners, decent stereos, etc.
Desktop touch functionality wouldn't necessarily be added to the primary display. Apple has filed patents for using touch screens for keyboards and trackpads. Even if it was for the primary display, apple has a patent for a movable display that is oriented horizontally when used as a touch screen.
It's not clear how or whether would add desktop touch features, but they've clearly considered it.
Touching your display is a horrible idea (I wonder how those new windows machines that do this are selling) [1], but the trackpad on the MBP is the thing that finally made me buy one.
[1] Imagine working whole day having to hold your arms up to operate the mouse cursor. My arm hurts just thinking about it.
Every Apple patent doesn't result in a shipped product or feature.
This is Apple we're talking about; they love secrecy, don't want nobody to know what they're doing.
Some of the patents they've filed are probably just ideas, some of them make it into products or features, and some are probably red herrings, meant just to throw their competition off.
The user interface elements in MacOS are supplied by AppKit, in iOS it's UIKit. What I expect to see is a marriage of the two with AppKit perhaps reimplemented with UIKit classes.
Fracturing UIKit isn't unprecedented, it's already done on iOS with the iPad having widgets and features not available on iPhone.
UIKit is cleaner having been redesigned after so many years and with so many other technologies baked (CGLayer & CoreAnimation for example).
AppKit would continue to exist for some time with developers having the option of mixing the two (as not all features will be available at the UIKit layer to start.)
A good example of where UIKit bests AppKit is the seemingly simple "Put an animated progress meter in a table row". This is easy in UIKit because table cells are UIViews. However, in AppKit, a table cell is a NSCell which is -not- a view.
On MacOS nearly everything has a NSView and a NSCell component (i.e. NSButton, NSButtonCell)
On iOS there are no cells. (UIButton, no UIButtonCell.)
Other AppKit classes will be implemented using their UIKit counterparts (NSView to UIView, NSWindow to UIWindow).
The result will be a much cleaner development environment for applications that favors animation, multi-touch, and code reuse with the iOS platform.
Even if that's the only new feature in 10.7, I'll be ponying my money up for it. I completely love the SSD in my MBP, but the occasional stuttering does get annoying at times.
This is purely made-up dreaming, but I hope your last point comes in the form of a Dashboard-like thing that lets you easily launch iOS apps. Pop it up and launch when needed, hide it when you don't.
Personally I never use Dashboard, it was cool to play with for a couple of hours and after that the novelty wore off. It really hasn't seen any innovation at all, and overall feels out of place.
If they put iOS support in Mac OS X that would be awesome, but I hope they do it in a way that they are just like other apps on my desktop that can be put in the dock. That way I am much more likely to use the apps.
I use it regularly as well, (calculator, calendar, weather, stocks, and iStat) but I agree with the previous poster than developer interest in dashboard widgets is pretty minimal these days. It would be great if I could run arbitrary iPhone apps in the dashboard alongside my widgets.
I think it makes sense for Apple as well, since the value proposition for iOS to developers is shaping into an argument that, yes, there are a lot of Android phones out there, but there are a huge number of iPod Touches, iPads - and perhaps now Macs - in the hands of customers that can run the same iOS apps.
Apple has something going for iOS relative to android, even without running iaoS apps on macs: people actually install apps on iOS devices, not only that, they'll pay for them.
iTunes already wants to be too much. It has a store (with credit card management), your local music library, a social network, movies that you are supposed to watch via Apple TV, podcast management, the app store, low-level device management, a set of ratings systems for apps and music and movies... It's too much in one package. It violates a lot of good design principles. For example, because it's got so much going on, they can't optimize it for any one task. A lot of people think it needs some decoupling, not extra features.
I think if Apple wants FaceTime to be on Windows and non-iOS phones, they need to promote the protocol and not just one application of that protocol.
I was expecting the new release to be named Maine Coon or Cougar, jokes apart I hope some new improvements in Finder, file searching, some cool features for new hardware and a complete system compiled by clang. Maybe a bunch of small new software, I particulary would love a serious package manager, a interface to deal with launchctl and a working useradd that works with DirectoryService.
> The computing world is shifting into the age of mobile, and iOS is now seen as Apple’s major operating system. Perhaps OS X Lion will represent the beginning of a unification between OS X and iOS. And if Apple is giving it the Lion moniker, which they won’t be able to top, perhaps they mean this to be last version of OS X? (Though they do say “next” version of Mac OS X and not “last”.)
It seems that it would be fundamentally stupid for Apple to try and merge OS X and iOS. They are operating systems that target different types of devices with wildly methods of user interaction.
Do people really see the iPhone and Mac being equivalent devices so soon? Or is this TechCrunch article just full of shit?
Just because they are obviously calling it "Lion" doesn't mean it wont be just another iterative update (Although it might not). Look at iTunes 10. They had the chance to do something huge with revision number 10 (like make it work on Windows!) but it was just another version of iTunes with a horrible icon and Ping!
My wild-ass guess is that Apple is going to let the apps from iOS run in a sandbox environment on OS X 10.7, which really shouldn't be that hard to do since development code runs on emulated iOS devices. This would broaden the reach of the iOS ecosystem.
> which really shouldn't be that hard to do since development code runs on emulated iOS devices.
That's incorrect. Apps that run in the iOS Simulator are compiled to i386 code and run as a native OS X processes. They are essentially OS X apps that link to UIKit instead of AppKit.
Edit: That's not to say Apple couldn't support such a scenario. Many App Store apps are already fat binaries that include ARMv6 and ARMv7 code. No reason why they couldn't include i386 code as well to facilitate running on Mac hardware.
Yes, and the "not that hard" remark was in reference to their deep experience moving from 68K to PPC to x86. So, having fat binaries is not a foreign concept to them at all.
Integrating iOS apps (where users are already conditioned to being exposed to advertising) with some version of OS X would not be a big leap from a technical or business strategy perspective.
I suspect that Apple's heading down the same road as XNA, because XNA enables a developer to build WPF applications that can run on Windows, XBox, and Zune; presumably also on the latest Windows Mobile as well.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if future versions, maybe even the upcoming release, set up an equivalent situation on the mac platform, now that Apple has a new TV device in addition to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
Heck, if Apple decided to be aggressive about getting into the living room and entertainment center, they could launch a box that's basically a souped up Apple TV with something close to an order of magnitude higher performance than an XBox 360 simply by building it around a Sandy Bridge, and have a significant contender in the gaming console market.
What about OSX 10.7 for ARM? There are some impressive high end ARM SoCs in the pipeline. We know Apple isn't afraid of big architecture transitions. They've got a lot invested in ARM via PA Semi & Intrinsity. Sounds very plausible to me.
The event isn't for another week. Are we going to be subjected to a steady stream of contentless speculation from the Apple pundit set for the next 7 days? I'm actually really excited for the announcement, but I couldn't care less what MG Siegler's opinion of it is.
Right, I'll be ok. This was just my attempt at discouraging people from upvoting the next 20 such articles without resorting to the this-isnt-hacker-news-please-sandblast-me meme.
I really hope OSX won't be the first release of OS X that only starts applications signed by Apple and bought in the Apple Desktop App Store (or whatever it's going to be called).
Apple also has it's own tick/tock of releases, between developer features and end user features - 10.4 and 10.6 being the former, and 10.5 being the latter. Thus, we're probably going to see a lot of new whiz-bang end user features in 10.7.
"Unification" already exists - iOS and MacOS X core OS and kernel code is fairly similar, as is much of the userland API. It's different for obvious reasons (many to do with touch/hardware limitations), and unless those differences go away (which I don't see happening - touch on an iMac form factor = serious arm pain), I don't see much point to the talk of unification.