Comments on: Should There Be iOS Support for the Mac?

By: peterwindle

peterwindle — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:34:24 +0000

I think we’re going to see a major split in Apple. iOS will be on all consumer products and Mac OS will be on all the ‘pro’ products. Sadly, I see the ‘pro’ products becoming a shrinking market and there will be more and more consumer products.
I also grew up with older Macs (512k) and they where FAST and simple. I can see why apple are creating more specialised products running iOS.
The only thing I really miss is the ‘hobby’ PC – The Apple II was a great example of an affordable customisable, programmable home computer.
What I would like very much to see Mac OS become a standard on a ‘hobby’ PC, something anyone can afford and pull apart, learn on and create great apps for iOS devices on. ;-)

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:21:01 +0000

Someone's probably already had the idea of the trackpad on a MacBook running iOS. It would be able to run when the MacBook is asleep or off, and would save you having to boot up full OSX if you just wanna check a site or your mail or something. The details would need to be ironed out but it's a fundamentally good idea I think.

Weren't there some Windows laptops with another screen running Linux or something along those lines? They were nice but ahead of their time I feel.

By: hanna

hanna — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:42:12 +0000

as long as iOS wasn't the boot system

By: Shock Me

Shock Me — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:20:59 +0000

I think for this to happen you would need an interaction surface surrounding your keyboard. In this surface an A4 processor could be placed. It could start with the dashboard as the video output. Your fingers could all be pointers with cursors tracking each location. Just as you don't pickup your mouse and slide it over the screen, the interaction surface would stay on the desktop like a digitzing tablet.

I can see this working. It already works with the mobile mous app.

By: Sid Farcus

Sid Farcus — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:50:51 +0000

Why would anyone who relies on their Mac for their living, want to dumb-down their computer? iOS has no command line, no automation, no inter-application communication. No drag and drop between apps, no file system... etc, etc, etc.

I don't understand why those limitations would appeal to anyone?

By: G Hall

G Hall — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:35:04 +0000

I kind of half-agree. I would like to see Mac OS X running iOS apps, just not the full OS. Maybe as some sort of Dashboard replacement.

By: John C. Randolph

John C. Randolph — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:46:54 +0000

This already exists, as part of the Xcode tools. We have an iPhone/iPad simulator.

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:58:01 +0000

Why do I see this suggestion so often? There are so many problems with it. iOS apps are designed for touch and macs don't have touch screens. Using them with a keyboard and mouse would be a pain in the ass. I can't imagine scrolling through large lists like I do now. Accelerometer? GPS? Back facing camera? They also aren't designed to operate in a window or really be resized. I bet you'd find the experience to be worse than you imagine.

Apps are also designed for the iPad or iPhone. Trying to run them when the screen size differs significantly won't be a good experience either.

Try imagining using your iMac with a touch screen? Lifting your arm up constantly to reach the screen? Ugh. A notebook isn't much better. Pressure on the screen pushes it back. Small netbooks with touch screens are normally significantly smaller than 12" so it's more like a hand holdable device. Apple already has the iPad which beats those devices for the most part.

No, it's not coming to Macs anytime soon. The two OSs are designed to live on very different machines and Apple can support those well. They isn't any need for merging them. They share a lot of code which is the only place sharing needs to be done.

By: KsbjA

KsbjA — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:27:03 +0000

As far as I can remember, I’ve never used something below System 7. I have a black PowerBook (Lombard or similar, haven’t yet been able to confirm its full name), running System 9, sitting on my table left from me. I love playing around with the OS every now and then, and I really like it. It’s pretty powerful for its time and has some neat features I even miss on OS X. However, it has the nasty “freeze” that is there since (I think) System 7 and most likely all its predecessors. (“Freeze” means that your Mac just… freezes – it stops accepting input and nothing changes on the screen – you have to do a hard reset. It happens frequently and randomly.) It’s a good OS, it really is, but if Apple wouldn’t have made OS X out of NEXTstep, they’d probably have ended up having an OS that’s based on decades old and outdated code, is unstable, polished up on the very surface, keeps crashing and needs to be reinstalled every year or even more often. In other words, Windows. Only by Apple.

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:32:14 +0000

I can't.see any advantage in running iOS on a mac. It would almost certainly be slower and I can see absolutely nothing to be gained. certainly I have no use for a touch screen when I have a keyboard and mouse. I certainly would not install an OS where iOS is primary and the full Mac OS is secondary