XYMer's Home away from Home

My 2017 iPad Pro is amazingly powerful. So powerful that other than scanning with my Epson 850 Pro I don’t really have a need for my iMac and it is a new 27” 5k machine. The iPad processes raw images and 4K video lighting quick. And Adobe is said to be working in a full version of Photoshop. For me that might be the nail in the coffin for the old desktops and laptop computers. I would like a more capable IOS however come on Apple. Give me a true Pro level OS for my Pro iPad. The way it handles files being the most troublesome issue. Thinking about it and he’ll i wish I could use my scanner with the iPad. Now of course I just do light work nothing demanding pro’s will be needing.

Apple has been trying to kill off the Mac for years.

OS X had its nail in the coffin ages ago. It's called macOS now.

But, really, iOS is just a customized build of OS X. A fork in open source parlance. What Apple's been doing the past few years is basically forcing OS X to do things the way iOS does them so they have less code to maintain. In many ways I'm pretty sure the entire reason Apple's going gung-ho about only supporting 64-bit only code in macOS is because iOS dropped support for 32-bit CPUs a few versions ago. Making both platforms 64-bit only would make Apple's life easier, and that's all that matters.

If Mac dies it won't be because iOS was substantially better. It's because Apple doesn't want to make personal computers anymore. The margins just aren't high enough, and Mac customers think they should be able to hold onto hardware longer than a couple years.

Since iOS devices use a different instruction set to begin with, I doubt Apple saves much trouble by forcing OS X* to 64-bit to keep its bitness in sync with iOS. I do, however, think Apple will save a lot of trouble by dropping i386 as a standalone change, irrespective of iOS.

As for iPads replacing my Mac, I spend all day programming and will gouge my eyes out (or more likely switch to Linux, FreeBSD, or even Windows) before trying to use any device so locked down as an iOS device for development. Lockdown and programming are mutually incompatible.

There are plenty of other things that fall in the same category. Even for something as basic as using the web, I'm not going to tolerate being forced to use Safari. Apple may want the Mac to disappear, or may think it wants the Mac to disappear, but in the iOS ecosystem Apple has spent so much energy building, that's completely untenable.

I may be alone in this respect, but at this time an iPad can only replace about 20% of what I do each day, and I'd be pretty annoyed with about 85% of that 20%. Flat iPad sales suggest I'm not the only one.

- Anonymous

* Or "OS 8" or whatever they call it nowadays.

My thought is that there's parts of macOS devoted to interacting and switching from 32-bit vs. 64-bit environments that existed on both platforms up until the 64-bit only switch on iOS. Dropping 32-bit on macOS means that entire part of the OS can be orphaned. The actual code is compiled for a different architecture but there can be a surprising amount of code-reuse in projects if you design it in from the start, and given how often Apple's been otherwise needlessly reinventing the wheel since iOS started I'd be surprised if they didn't share a lot of code.

Also, I wonder what key combination someone will have to hold down at startup on an iPad to force Photoshop to reset its preferences to default?

Maybe a little pull down menu that starts Photoshop and resets

Fat good that'll do you when Photoshop crashes at startup.

My joke was aimed at Adobe, who has never managed to stop corrupting its preferences on its existing platforms, so one can assume that behavior will extend to new platforms.