But as a former Surface Pro owner who now has an iPad Pro, I don’t see that happening. The iPad is immeasurably better as a tablet when you have tablet-oriented software available. And when you don’t, obviously the Surface’s compromise of “have a crappy desktop experience too” is usable if you need to have that option. But it’s not good compared to stuff designed for a tablet.
Similarly, the chunks of Windows 10 that are clearly designed for touchscreens (like the new Settings app) are not great on a desktop compared to the older and still more powerful control panel. More consistent, sure, as any ground-up redo would be, but the information density of things like the Add or Remove Programs list is awful compared to what it was before.
I don’t think Apple is going to make those compromises. They might do a more converged developer backened for Mac and iOS to make it easier to target both platforms, but they won’t shove the frontends together.
This, I think, is the most accurate picture of future iOS / Mac convergence. Universal binaries that present either a desktop, tablet, or phone UI based on where they're running.
Microsoft's mistake was trying to converge the desktop and tablet UIs.
Unifying the Mac frontend into that ecosystem just seems like the obvious conclusion.
I don't know that they'd strictly be the same executable, but at least as far as the user is concerned they would be the same piece of software. From a developer perspective, multiple UIs built with slightly different flavors of AppKit depending on the UI paradigm, including the Mac which is currently targeted by AppKit.
iOS doesn’t handle that kind of UI well.
There’s also the cost issue. All but the most exotic iOS apps cost less than $100. Many professional apps cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
It’s not just a fundamentally different market. The products are fundamentally different in critical ways.
I can imagine a hybrid MacPad product - maybe a dual-panel clamshell - but if it’s done badly it would be the worst of both worlds.
I auspect it could a succesful replacement for the iOS product line, with dual MacPadOS and iOS support.
But I can’t see it working for professionals without a lot of breakage.
If it didn't need a totally separate UI framework, ports like this would take less effort and more apps would do it. Maybe you can't sell it for 6x the cost any more, but a comparatively small amount of work gives you a leg up on the competition.
Twitter is another example. They killed the native Mac client earlier this year and said "For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web."
It's also worth noting that when he said that, Chromebooks didn't run android apps.
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-m...
>We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad, because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.