On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 08:53:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
One is a touch-first mobile OS that heavily restricts what you can do in the background and didn't even have a file manager until this year, while the other is a classic desktop OS, so there are significant differences.
Yes, there are differences for the end user, such as the the sandboxing, but that also applies to applications in OS-X appstore though. I don't expect iOS to change much in that department, I think Apple will continue to get people into their iCloud…
On the API level iOS is mostly a subset, and features that was only in iOS has been made available on OS-X. The main difference is in some UI classes, but they both use the same tooling and UI design strategies.
So in terms of XCode they are kinda similar.
I never said they don't write apps for macOS, I said iOS is a much bigger market which many more write for.
Yes, there are more Apple developers in general. Not sure if the number of people doing OS-X development has shrunk, maybe it has.
The same may happen to the iPhone some day, but it shows no signs of letting up.
They probably will hold that market for a while as non-techies don't want to deal with a new unfamiliar UI.
Since they still have a ways to go to make the cameras or laptop-functionality as good as the standalone products they replaced, it would appear they can still convince their herd to stay on the upgrade cycle.
That is probably true, e.g. low light conditions.
While I disagree that you can't commoditize the Mac, as you could just bundle most of the needed functionality into an iPhone
My point was that it is easier to commoditize the iPhone than the Mac. There is a very limited set of apps that end users must have on a phone.
they've already significantly cut the team working on it.
Ok, didn't know that. I've only noticed that they stopped providing competitive products after Jobs died.
No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the performance.
I don't think this is the case. It is because of the monopoly they have in the top segment. Intel was slow at progress until Athlon bit them too. If they felt the pressure they would put their assets into R&D. Remember that new products have to pay off R&D before making a profit, so by pushing the same old they get better ROI. Of course, they also have trouble with heat and developing a new technological platform is very expensive. But if they faced stiff competition, then they certainly would push that harder.
In general the software market has managed to gobble up any performance improvements for decades. As long as developers spend time optimizing their code then there is a market for faster hardware (which saves development costs).
The Intel i9-7900X sells at $1000 for just the chip. That's pretty steep, I'm sure they have nice profit margins on that one.
You are conflating two different things, fashionable academic topics and industry projections for actual production, which is what I was talking about.
What do you mean by industry projections? It was quite obvious by early 2000s that most people with cellphones (which basically was everyone in Scandinavia) would switch to smart phones. It wasn't a surprise.
confident in them that you bet your company on them. Nobody other than Apple did that, which is why they're still reaping the rewards today.
Only Microsoft had a comparable starting point. iOS is closely related to OS-X. Not sure if Nokia could have succeed with scaling up Symbian. Maybe, dunno.
