Mac (i)OS, the Future of the Desktop
There was a giant argument raging on Macbreak Weekly on the future of the Mac OS. Alex Lindsay thinks Apple, within 5 – 10 years, will license or open source the OS, pretty much abandoning the desktop in favor of its mobile iOS platform. Andy Ihnatko vehemently disagrees, thinking there’s lots of life left in the desktop; he is merely curious about what Mac OS XI is going to look like. I think they’re both kind of wrong.
It’s isn’t clear to me that the desktop is dying; I think it’s merely matured. They are selling more desktop Macs than ever before. There’s little growth in the PC market, but where it’s happening, it’s happening in Apple Stores. It’s just totally clear to anybody with the open mind and cash to appreciate it: Apple makes a better PC product than anybody else. On this score, I think Andy’s right.
However, I’m not sure there will be a “Mac OS XI” as one would imagine it, either. I think we have already seen the future of computing, and it’s the iPad and iOS. The desktop form factor will not go away soon, in terms of raw hardware capabilities, special interfaces, direct access to storage, and that sort of thing. But I think the paradigm of what we know as the “desktop OS” is going to go away. Oh, it will still be there for the über-power users, but more and more for the rest of us, what we know as the “file system” and discrete “program files,” or even “documents” is going to go away. For example, take an image. What is that? It’s a certain kind of binary file on the disk, you say. Is it? What about metadata? What about the preview, icon representation, other resolutions? It’s vector version? As the data we work with has become more sophisticated, the simple notion of a “physical” file on disk has become inadequate – all of these other aspects have been abstracted away behind a data “object,” shown to us in a media browser as a single icon.
Apple is set, with its leadership in iOS, to determine the standards by which these objects are constructed and communicated. I would far rather my desktop already treat things with this abstraction. I love working in iMovie or iPhoto for this reason, or even my iPhone when I can get away with it. They take care of all the messy details of what things are actually called on disk, where they are stored, where the original and backup versions are, all of that. Indeed, on the Mac the only time I deal with a “file” is when I have to convert a download from one video format to another. And even then, now it’s down to one app I run to convert it and drop it into iTunes, and from there it’s not longer a file, it’s just a movie object I can put on my iPhone if I want, or just have it ready to play in Front Row.
So to me, the question isn’t, “What will OS XI look like and when will it get here?” it’s, “How soon will iOS be running on desktop Macs?” Look, they’ve already got iWork and iMovie, and the equivalents of iPhoto, iTunes, and the like for iOS, not to mention the GIGANTIC, unprecedented, largest library of software for any platform, EVER, to do just about everything else you would want to do on a computer.