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Re:AppStore Preferences can be unlocked by a local admin wit... by derefr on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @02:17PM (#16117971)
Most of the codebases of both iOS and macOS are fundamentally the same kind of (low-level but architecture-independent C and Objective-C) code, and encouraging team unification will make that even more true—if the same people are working on both AppKit and UIKit, for example, it's a no-brainer to unify them rather than maintaining that duplication.

The exception is the kernels and drivers of each OS, which have to consider things like architecture, but I would expect that it'll still be the same individual engineers working on these who always have, no matter what their team structure looks like now. Whether or not Apple has a formal "macOS kernel team" or "iOS kernel team", those groups definitely exist and have rather static membership.

(In fact, one main benefit you might see from this is that Apple has hardware hires—many from Intel[1]—who have stepped up to apply their knowledge of formal verification methods to the iOS kernel and drivers, but haven't necessarily had the flexibility to spread that love to macOS. That can change now.)

[1] https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ (search for "Apple")

Re:AppStore Preferences can be unlocked by a local admin wit... by msie on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @06:19PM (#16120071)
Duplication of effort is something that a small company may worry about but Apple has boatloads of money.
Re:AppStore Preferences can be unlocked by a local admin wit... by saurik on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @06:54PM (#16120256)
It isn't just "we coded it twice" (which I would still argue is bad from a security perspective with respect to making sure both are actually correct), but "we both designed an API to solve the same kind of problem... different... so now the world has two APIs to learn on these weirdly different platforms when, by all rights, we should have just designed one".