The Mac is Doomed
- iOS devices are far outselling Mac OS X, and the gulf is growing
- The iPad and the MacBook (the only Mac that matters) are converging on the same place on the product diagram: an ultra-light portable computing device with long battery life
- iOS is already capable of doing nearly anything that Mac OS X can do, and keeps getting better.
- Mac OS X shows signs of becoming less capable, through deliberate crippling of applications by the OS.
– Chris Adamson, Five Years, That’s All We’ve Got
Chris’s argument as to why the death of the Mac is inevitable pretty much mirrors my own thinking on the subject, and the whole thing’s well worth a read.
Where Chris and I differ is that he – being able to use an iPad as his primary computer – seems fairly ambivalent about the transition, whereas I see it unambiguously as a bad thing. iOS is a great OS for phones, and a passable one for tablets, but for me it will just never cut it as a primary OS. I want my primary computing device to multi-task. I want it to have a windowing environment. Hell; I want it to have a file-system. These capabilities of modern computer systems didn’t gain widespread adoption through an accident of history; they’re critically important to the way a bunch of people – specifically me – want to use their computers.
I originally wrote a long rant here about why iOS isn’t as suitable as OSX for the desktop, but really I don’t think that’s controversial. I don’t even think it’s particularly controversial to regard the “iOS-ification” of OSX in Lion as a bad thing. Actually, I don’t think there is any controversy in this discussion; everyone understands the situation, just some of us don’t like it. The problem isn’t one of disagreement; it’s simply the case that Apple’s interests no longer align (or soon won’t) with those of Mac users.
The ideal outcome for a Mac user, and I hope to hell this isn’t controversial, is the status-quo; for Apple to continue to produce both a world-class desktop OS in the shape of OSX, and an awesome mobile OS in the shape of iOS. The two don’t need to converge, one doesn’t need to be dropped; they’re separate products that serve separate needs for different (albeit overlapping) markets.
OSX sells many fewer units than iOS, it’s true, but then it’s a more mature product and could arguably be considered feature-complete. All Apple really needs to do is keep OSX ticking over with the occasional new feature and current hardware support and I’ll bet most Mac users would happy enough to keep buying Apple hardware to run it on. Especially if the alternative is the death of the whole platform, or a slow morphing into “iOS: mouse-edition”.
Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to work for Apple; they’ve never shown any inclination to let the status-quo get in the way of their vision of the future before. That vision right now is of ubiquitous, touch-screen iOS devices, not powerful emplaced desktop machines. I strongly suspect that those of us using Macs are going to have to get with that vision, or find someone else to buy our computers from.