> will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs

Will they, though? Because Catalina seems like a giant step in the wrong direction if you’re thinking they’re acknowledging the developer - or even power user - need. Seems to me they’ve doubled down on the iOS approach to macOS.

In Catalina, I see the move towards these macOS & iOS compatible apps ("Catalyst") as making it easier to develop apps for both. It's a service for developers, if you will (I am not an app developer!)

I don't necessarily see it as trying to create a single OS for both desktop and mobile.

To be clear: I’m not saying they’re trying to create a single OS. I’m saying the “Apple knows best” concepts they’re applying to macOS that are seemingly inspired by iOS are very hostile to a large part of their user base.

Fair, thanks for clarifying!

I, in fact, find the catalyst apps on macOS still needing work. And I’m talking the Apple ones: Music, News

Music is not a Catalyst app. Did you mean the new Podcasts app? Music is a trimmed down version of iTunes which is a Cocoa app.

Trimmed down in some respects, buggier and slower in others. It may seem to be a Catalyst to some because many aspects of the UI severely regressed to custom implementations of standard Cocoa controls that iTunes 12 used.

I wouldn't be so sure. Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017).

Sure, the industry ended up following them on a lot of this, but that should be as much a cause for concern as the rest of it. An awful lot of the pro audio / video work that happens on high end Apple hardware could absolutely happen on a machine where the only software comes in via an app store.

> Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017).

sure, but all that functionality remained externally - just not as part of the laptop. locking down the laptop is fundamentally different.

I don't know if those are the best examples. You can still plug a floppy drive or an ethernet adapter into a 2020 macbook pro's usb port.

I think what they did was they changed what it looks like to be a pro user. The average user gets a sleak experience while a "pro" user is going to have a docking station.

I actually like that they transitioned to the docking station approach. It means two things:

1. I have a lighter macbook pro for work travel 2. At my desk, one single cable: charges the computer; connects two additional monitors, ethernet, keyboard, mouse, sd card reader, high speed storage, and a scanner. I much prefer that one single cable vs the bundle of cables I used to have to plug/unplug each time I wanted to take or return my computer.

Exactly. The exec team have confirmed that including Schiller in recent interviews.

macOS is for everything, including Dev. They need that for the ecosystem. Look at the new Mac Pro ffs.

Can’t most apps just recompile to support new chip? We don’t need fat binaries right?

And they'll continue to say that right until the moment they yank the rug out from under you when all the pieces are in place.

The trop that your logic falls into is there's no way to disprove Apple will ever do this.

10 years from now, we'll probably be having the same argument, and people will be pointing to the latest release of macOS and complaining that surely this one means the end is nigh.

Indeed. I've been hearing people crow on about this since Lion. That was 10 years ago. OS X might be macOS now, but it's still fundamentally the same OS.

But there is an easy way to prove that they will and that 10 year horizon is short enough that I believe it will happen. Apple never cared about developers, they care about moving units and profits. Right now they are not getting a slice of the action of all software sales for the Mac and that must be a temptation they find hard to resist.

Remember how they turned their backs on the creative people that kept them alive for over a decade when everybody else had switched to windows? Similar story, similar ending.

> Let's not confuse moving Macs to ARM processors with turning Macs into iOS devices.

I wouldn't be surprised if they just do that. Ship the lower end laptops with ARM and either an extended iOS or a constrained MacOS.

> Apple has always treated the OS families differently and will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs.

But the different needs part only really applies for the high end Mac Books and from apples POV might no longer be a think if you can develop Swift/Objective-C and similar on iOS.

How would we expect a amd64->ARM compatibility layer to work? Emulation? Do we have any reason to think that would achieve acceptable performance?

Windows already does x86 to arm (not 64bit yet) in Windows on ARM and it works fine. Can play games and stuff ok on it, so definitely "acceptable". Not sure if great, but it's definitely usable.