An iOS laptop for Harry?
Harry McCracken wrote an article a few days back, where he muses around a laptop with iOS. He specifies many of the good properties of his current setup with an iPad and an external keyboard, and how it would be glorious if Apple decided to build a laptop proper, running iOS instead of Mac OS X. I don’t think that McCracken is wrong or that it’s a bad article. Not at all! I just have a different idea of how Apple will deal with something along those lines.
I just don’t think we will see a laptop running iOS as its main operating system simply because Apple wants to keep the two systems separate. The intended use-cases and intended types of devices are different and I firmly believe that Apple will keep it that way. There has been a lot of mumblings in the rumor underground that iOS and Mac OS X will become one in the very near future, often followed by some finger-pointing at Mac OS X 10.7 for proof of this statement. I think that is just a big misunderstanding of what is really going on.
The two systems are actually the same, to a certain degree. While the name for iOS is different it’s still very much Mac OS X tailored for running on an ARM processor along with a whole hoopla of customized API’s, not to mention that it’s built around the notion of all input coming from the touch screen as well as the many sensors in the device. Under all the specialization the code is most likely quite similar and will just as likely stay that way for the foreseeable future too.
One of the many features of Mac OS X from the start, back when it was NextStep, was the ability to port it to many different processor architectures, which was used by Apple to move from the stagnating PowerPC platform to the Intel platform. That same mentality and design process allowed Apple to be able to run pretty much Mac OS X on an ARM chip, namely in the iPhone.
Why the short history lesson above? Well, I think that it would be more likely that Apple moves Mac OS X to ARM than that we will se iOS run on a laptop. As I mentioned, being a highly portable operating system is one of the strengths of Mac OS X and I’m willing to bet that they have had it running on most imaginable architectures for some time. This includes ARM.
Apple doesn’t need to build a laptop that runs iOS when it can just move the best features from iOS to Mac OS X, as they have done in the case of Lion. As time goes on I think there will be no merge of the existing code bases, but rather that the most crucial functions will migrate between platforms depending on which platform gets the specific feature first. This would be an appropriate way of doing things in that it would save Apple, developers and users a fair bit of trouble in the short term. No new architecture to have to take into consideration as we did back in 2006 when things moved to a new platform the last time.
I do think that a move to ARM is in the cards, sooner or later. The advantages are many and Apple has quite a lot of staff specialized in the field now, after buying several companies over the last 6 years. As soon as there is enough computational power in the ARM chip to at least keep even pace with the Intel chips, Apple will move there as fast as they can. Slimmer devices, longer battery life and no more fan to make noises while we work away on our computers. The very same reasons that many favor the iPad in terms of hardware, over an Apple laptop.
So eventually I think Harry McCracken will get his dream machine, only it will be a MacBook of some kind. It’ll still be whisper quiet and blazingly fast, while not stealing attention from what you really want to be doing, but it’ll still be a Mac.
