Marzipan As a Path to ARM-Based Macs
I really do hope we see things from iOS move to the Mac, touch and Pencil support in particular. And the idea that “folks don't want to use touch on the Mac” is pretty dumb when you realize Apple sells a hardware keyboard for the iPad which works exactly the same way as a touch Mac would.
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Well, what if they made it easier for other apps to possibly take their place or at least fill in the gaps until the giants can ship something? Where can we find a billion other developers that already have a codebase that's ready to be compiled on another architecture, because they don't have decades of legacy code to clean up?
And if you look at from this angle, UIKit for MacOS makes perfect sense. Even if it's only to potentially help with a transition, that may or not actually happen. It gives Apple leverage.
So I dove into the Frameworks folder in the latest macOS SDK and found a total of 147 frameworks listed there. Yikes! I went down the list and wrote down which ones I think could reasonably be jettisoned on an architecture switch (note that there would also be many APIs within various frameworks that could be tossed too, even if the framework as a whole sticks around).
Previously: Intel and the Danger of Integration, Apple Announces Marzipan for 2019.
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> And the idea that "folks don't want to use touch on the Mac" is pretty dumb when you realize Apple sells a hardware keyboard for the iPad which works exactly the same way as a touch Mac would.
But do most iPad users really buy and then use these keyboards? I know the Twitterati do, but I'd love to see hard numbers on how many people actually use their iPad as a laptop.
I still don't get the relation between architecture change and API change.
When Apple moved from PPC to x86, there where not many API deprecation.
@Jean-Daniel Even if they’re not technically forced to remove the deprecated APIs, it’s an opportunity to reduce their QA burden and encourage developers to migrate.
I have an iPad, have had several, use a keyboard with them and HATE having to lift my hands to touch the screen. I end up lifting my hand/my arm to fiddle with the screen. A mouse/touchpad is much more natural than touching the screen when using a keyboard. I'm not alone - my wife has the same experience. She'd love to travel with just an iPad and keyboard cover, but the user experience drives her back to her MacBook because everything she needs to interact with the UI is right under her fingers.
This is NOT the case if you type using the glass keyboard because then the keyboard / display is immediately under your fingers anyway. But the glass keyboard is a terrible user experience for me. I hate it and would quit using any device that required me to use it. I use voice input on my iPhone as much as possible.
Brian should have also considered /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks when he looked at the 10.1.5 SDK frameworks. The PrivateFrameworks probably include things that later graduated to public APIs.
> But do most iPad users really buy and then use these keyboards?
Probably not most, but a lot do. There are also a lot of people who use Windows devices with touchscreen.
>I have an iPad, have had several, use a keyboard with them and HATE having to lift my hands to touch the screen
Now try convincing the millions of kids who grew up on iPads, and don't understand why their parents' Mac is broken. In fact, even my own dad has started inadvertently touching his MacBook's screen, now that he's been using an iPad for a while. Personally, I've gotten so used to the touchscreen on my Surface that the MacBook Pro I use for work is starting to feel a little bit ridiculous.
I'm legitimately worried that if the Mac starts becoming more like iOS then we are going to begin to see regressions like our browsers deciding to randomly reload tabs, because for some dumb reason it needs to dump memory every 15 minutes. I wouldn't put it past Apple if it could save them a few bucks and makes Animojis more popular 🙄
(because AFAIK, there's no legitimate reason for iOS in 2018 to not be able to keep browser tabs loaded in perpetuity [or the current state of any app, really] like my 2009 MBP with lower specs can easily do.)
@Jean-Daniel, Maybe not an API change, but the message to developers at the time was: to get a universal app that runs on both platforms, use the latest version of Xcode to compile your app.
In one swoop, Apple got the entire mac developer market moved to the latest version of their compiler. That's the kind of power that an architectural change gives them.
Ben G,
Man, I hate it when browsers reload my tabs, as in hard reload where I lose everything I might have been doing. Yet, with Firefox on this Linux laptop, I just typed half the reply, quit the browser, relaunched, restored tabs, and continued typing the rest of this reply. I would prefer that not happen on a desktop class OS, but could have sworn Safari on Mac OS started reloading tabs in this way many years back.
Yeah, I thought so:
http://www.chriswrites.com/stop-safari-automatically-reloading-tabs-in-os-x-lion/
Very annoying. Not sure if modern Safari still does that, but I ditched Safari for good around this time.
Lukas,
I agree with Adam, while I don't mind using the touchscreen for some things, when I'm in "laptop mode", I don't want to be forced to use the touchscreen. My experience was iPad 3 with keyboard back in the day, didn't like it, too limited, that would have been iOS 5 and 6 I think. I'm sure it must be somewhat better now, but I'm so fast on keyboard shortcuts and quick mouse/trackpad edits, it's very hard to switch.
P.s. In some ways Android is far ahead here, you've been able to connect a keyboard and mouse to Android devices for years, works pretty well actually. Shoot, my old Nokia smartphones could do this too, so I don't understand the hold up with Apple. Sometimes simple and functional is far better than clever but over engineered.
>I don't want to be forced to use the touchscreen
Of course. Nobody should be forced to use a touchscreen, even on touchscreen notebooks.
