Thankfully Apple comprises vastly smarter people than me, but I've always thought this is a bad idea.
The two interaction models are so dramatically different that I don't see how merging them makes sense. A finger is not a mouse.
There are no good or bad ideas :) Its all about time, place, knowledge of tradeoffs, execution, business, marketing, taking into account all stakeholders (user is one of them) and everything holistic :)
What you say is true, a finger is not a mouse. But we're now a decade past the release of iPhone, and by this time, the industry in general (and Apple in particular) have deep knowledge about all the tradeoffs involved here. 5 years before and this can be considered a reckless bet that requires a Steve Jobs to pull out. Now, its just natural evolution. Responsive design has been around for even longer, and changing interactions based on screen and form factors is a pretty mature problem domain now.
To be very specific:
- whether its a finger or mouse can be a runtime decision, not necessarily a compile-time or clean-slate/distribution decision for different platforms
- those decisions are already standardized enough based on existing knowledge that you can let the platform/framework (or 3p libraries) handle it out-of-the-box for you and just register multiple possibilities. instead of debating finger vs mouse - think finger and mouse
i.e. different interactions requiring entirely different apps - is not necessarily true for all of them. for a 2D application, some amount of standardization is actually good, otherwise it doesn't really help all the interaction patterns and may instead stagnate them.
Is my anecdotal too far off?
If you look at the PPC->Intel timeline[1], Apple announced it 6 months in advance, although it went fairly quickly after that.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...
Not necessary. They only need to ship one model of Mac Mini or any small desktop lineup with Ryzen to improve their negotiating position while still being compatible with the existing x86_64 ecosystem.
So no, this is not merely a negotiation jibe. There are definite long-term prospects.
We're already moving to a mobile-first design and approach world. Having those mobile/tablet apps expand automatically to desktop is the next logical conclusion. As an app developer, there is nothing better than write-once-run-everywhere, and the cascading effects of that on the whole Apple ecosystem and future consumer audience is hard to understate. Keeping aside power, efficiency, device prices, opportunity costs and much more.
> significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today.
Definitely not today. Its been speculated for many years now ever since the A4 chips, and its still not official news. Usual "people who don't want to be identified". If or when this becomes official news, most partners would be like about time, because everyone is in one way or another working on convergence and multi-device. Adobe and Microsoft are examples of pivoting many of their desktop businesses successfully to cloud and apps already.