I disagree. OS X already has touch support. All Apple has to do is make a touch-sensitive screen for an MBP and add an emulator window for iOS and you have a hardware unit that runs everything.

iOS was originally cut down for performance reasons. Then large parts were locked for security - especially carrier network - security.

Performance isn't an issue, but carrier security is. And I don't think mobile users are going to be happy about having to download a constant stream of unlabelled Windows updates.

Where Apple went wrong was with iTunes, and especially with the horror show involved in getting information into and out of an iDevice. If you have an independent collection of music and books, it's just too clunky.

I bought an Android Galaxy Tab recently, and not only is the screen better than the screen on any iPad, getting books into it is trivially easy.

Either way, I'm glad Cupertino has competition. There's been more than a whiff of complacency from that part of the world in the last year or so, and I hope this makes Cook and Co sit up and stop taking the high end laptop market for granted.

Although gotta say - I'm still amused to see the MS presentation design following the Apple/Jobs presentation style so closely.

Maybe both companies should just merge? That would be interesting...

I don't think apple cares about the laptop market any more. Apple is and wants to be a phone company. Their MacBook Pro line is a legacy product. Also, their desktop OS is converging towards locked down mobile appliance and away from UNIX roots (it seems Apple won't be happy until they kill the file system access for the regular user and lock down OS X so only App Store apps can be run on it). In the end it will be a choice between buying a computer or a Mac.

So, to me Apple are out if the game. It will not be Apple who will give us the mobile workstation quality OS in a pocket device that can hook up to a screen around you and allow you to work like you do today on your desktop.

I disagree as well; not because it is Apple as Google is doing the same thing; 'people' (not people reading HN generally) really don't need to power of OS X or Windows or a fullblown Linux distro. In fact, they are much better off without. Windows / OSX drive a lot of people mad; iOS/Android/Chrome are simple. There is a market for Windows/OSX/Linux obviously but the current use of Windows is very much because of the history; by far most people / most jobs do not require anything like this and are, in fact, better off with a far more limited and more straight forward option. From companies that went to iPad (Android would've worked but it seems less popular) for sales reps and other staff; they say it saves them millions on training, installation, updating etc. Nevermind for non tech savvy consumers where this is even worse. I do not know how good MS Office is on the iPad but if it is good I have no clue why 99% of employees and consumers would not be fine with a tablet + keyboard and a very limited OS.

Edit; that said; bring on the competition. I would buy a Surface Pro just to experiment if it had more battery life. I hoped the 4 would be (a lot) better in that department but it is not. So then I'll just run my MBP with El Capitan instead for now; http://i.glui.me/1GuUc4H

Oddly enough, Microsoft had a dual operating system approach back in the 1990s. It developed Windows CE for small devices like PocketPCs (PDAs like the iPaq) and tablets, and for Windows Mobile smartphones.

CE was also the base for Windows Automotive.

I remember when the iPhone was announced (when the OS was still called "iPhone OS") Apple actually made a point to say it was OSX, and a non-compromise kind of OS. I still remember people drooling over the fact that Apple had managed to put the Macintosh OS on a phone.

The OS was way ahead compared to what else existed out there, and I do think it got some stuff from OSX, but now it's clearly on a very different state rather than merging/