Is the future of Mac...the iPhone?

I disagree with almost every statement above in this comment thread. I do not believe that Mac OS X has any future in programming or innovation. I believe the Mac line will witness a slow and painful death, a result from its little, (or should I say big at this point) brother. This is the first upgrade to Mac OS X on record that did not add any notable innovations. Snow Leopard is a mere upgraded version of Leopard with a few "under the hood" improvements. Under the hood improvements, improvements that someone cannot see or really prove, does NOT qualify as a new version of an operating system to me.

I believe Snow Leopard is proof that Apple is slowly losing interest in its computer line, never being successful enough to carry the company. Snow Leopard is the result of a lack of developers working on the desktop line of Mac OS X. Ultimately, my belief is that Apple will sooner become a handheld electronics maker rather than leader

One cannot forget about competition from Microsoft either. Windows 7 has been promised to be the most drastic upgrade to Windows since Windows XP. This is coming from a Mac user, who will soon be switching to Dell for the sheer fact I no longer see a benefit to using an Operating system who's creators are falling off the PC map. I can get a Dell laptop will all upgraded parts of an Apple laptop for 2/3 the price. Im talking twice as much GDDR3 RAM, same video card, a 7200 RPM hard drive, and more powerful processor for 400 dollars less. The fact is that Apple's losing its appeal to me when its Operating system no longer seems that impressing.

So basically the future is that a few corporation will control all computing power and you can get lock out or all your data wipe out if your interest and the interest of the corporation are against your own.


Interesting.

I think someone is a little paranoid with Windows 7.

Except for the touch and platform specific features, which are made as similar to the desktop Cocoa way of doing things as possible, Cocoa touch is pretty much just a stripped down version of desktop Cocoa's GUI bits.

The article makes it sound like it's some brand new, completely different API. It's not.

How true !! Why o why is it gone ?

Erica, you seem to think that the nice bits of iPhone APIs etc. would somehow require or be a result of it being a closed down platform and that making Mac APIs and development anything similar would require making Mac similarly closed. Two words.. Hell No.

"In contrast, consider in how many ways the Mac's successful history drags the platform down. A commitment to existing APIs and historical design practices show up in nearly every Mac development project."

Legacy APIs and precedent is the price of success. You don't just throw it all away just because some of it is less the elegant. You are basically advocating a transition that is more ambitious than the OS 9 to X transition.

"With the iPhone, you see a great new platform evolving without the need to be fully backwards compatible."

There are a lot of apps that will be only SL compatible. More than that, Apple has thus far shown no fear in leaving older computers behind. The iPhone is a terrible model for desktop computers, and is barely tolerable as a mobile platform in its closed nature. What made sense on a mobile network that is controlled by oligopolists doesn't make sense when you are trying to compete against commodity hardware in an open market.

There article basically is some sort of geek dream to eliminate old APIs and cruft even further. Advocating a closed platform redesign of a mature OS for no real reason than a bit of elegance is pretty much what defines an amateur.

After reading John Siracusa's painstaking Snow Leopard review over at Ars Technica, I think this posting is way off. Snow Leopard is much more powerful and futureproofed now, and is going to take off with the new OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch technologies, not go end of life.

The problem with this thesis is that programming the iPhone and programming Mac OS X, interface aside, are really not that much different.

In fact, AppKit (Mac) and UIKit (iPhone OS) aren't really drawing apart but rather back together: if you look at the new NSResponder events, you'll see Snow Leopard implements:

- (void)touchesBeganWithEvent:(NSEvent *)event

which looks straight out of iPhone programming, but is in fact Mac programming.

(This is also, to me, compelling evidence that the rumored iTablet will host Mac OS X...)

The claims of "simple elegance of the iPhone's built-from-the-start-as-Objective-C 2.0-based API is largely missing from Cocoa libraries" is also missing the point, as the Mac API is also benefitting from Objective-C 2.0 conventions. You can say, [legacyObject property] or legacyObject.property just as easily with the old API as new.

Garbage Collection and blocks are new additions to the Objective-C world, available on the Mac, but not yet on the iPhone, though eventually they will be.

I think my attitude is best summed up by saying: "Programming the iPhone and programming the Mac are the same, except where they are different." And those differences are due to the types of the devices: little screen vs big, touch vs mouse clicks (for the momment ;), modest CPU power vs monster cores of raw power.


PS To the guy who "looked" at Objective-C 2.0 and got C++ flashbacks... Hmm, try it see beyond the [squarebrackets scareMe] and @whatsthisagain typography. Cocoa really is very elegant. The patterns it follows are just as state of the art if not more so than any newer dynamic environment, with the benefit of having the power of hardware accessing procedural C there if you need it.

Objective-C is ELEGANT!? Honestly?

I'm glad so many people are happy to program in Objective-C, because a few hours dipping my toes into iPhone software development gave me flashbacks to C++ / MFC programming. After years of programming in modern high-level languages, I refuse to go back to such a primitive language.

Technology marches on, but Apple's development environment is stuck in the 80's with NeXT.