I don’t understand comments like this because iOS apps as well as macOS apps are built using macOS devices. While it may come to pass that iOS becomes a viable platform to develop iOS and macOS (?!) apps, Apple cannot proceed by removing the ability to develop apps on both platforms.
Apple has proved itself a canny organization with regard to the development and maintenance of its platforms (bugs and pain points notwithstanding), so it seems highly unlikely they would move forward in a way that prevents the development and maintenance of those major platforms.
They’ll be running apps, but the lines between iPhone, iPad, and Mac will be blurred and I think this is fine. Similar to how apps now may have different features or layouts as you switch from iPhone to iPad.
I’m a little less worried about them deprecating macOS. They could do it tomorrow really but there doesn’t seem to be a need to do so. I think the goal here is to actually make the Mac stronger by unlocking access to the iOS App Library. It’s a good goal. I know some will complain about the iOS apps not being open source or something but probably 95% of users (myself included) don’t really care. I find open source software extremely valuable, but I don’t care if Flappy Bird or Office 365 are open source. I just need to use the software and get on with my day.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/scott-hanselmans-2021-ultimat...
The Mac sits in an awkward position indeed, especially with Apple giving a touchpad and keyboard to the iPad Pro.
Unfortunately the modularity of Linux, despite being it's strength means that it can never possibly provide a UI/UX as coherent and interoperable as the Mac.
How can you provide things like spell checking, font rendering, copy/paste, drag and drop, password sync, across every widget and text field in the OS if every framework an application is built with and every part of the OS chain can be swapped out for something else and they're all made with distributed teams with no one at the helm to be the one to say "Drag and drop is broken in your app, you might not use it or care but others do, you need to fix it". or "Why does the text look weird in your app?"
This worries me because "M1 feels like Apple actually care about the Mac again" I completely disagree with this, I think Apple is aiming to have Macs running mostly iOS applications in the near future and MacOS will eventually be deprecated once we hit critical mass of that.
Not to mention the specific things I point out here that make the Mac great are being eroded away as more and more Mac apps are just electron wrapped React with custom text field components that disable OS spell checking and things like that.