Back To The Mac

Anyone reading this has no doubt heard about Apple's Back To The Mac event from last fall. If you haven't heard of it, here's the basics: Apple wants to make the Mac OS more like iOS. They want to bring the "magic" of iOS to the Mac. They want to bring multitouch gestures. They want the apps. They want all that's good about the iOS experience to come "back to the Mac".

Listening to podcasts and reading articles about it all, it seems to me that not enough people seem to grasp the whole situation, that not everyone sees the big picture when Apple talks about bringing bringing stuff back to the Mac. They seem to be forgetting that Apple is Apple, and that they care less about all the skin-deep changes that people have been talking about and more about the big picture, which is that Mac OS X, as a desktop operating system, is, as Steve Jobs might say, going the way of the truck, and that iOS is where the future of Apple lies.

Now, when I say that, I'm looking back to when the iPhone was first announced back in 2007 (has it really only been 4 years?). When the iPhone was first introduced it was touted as being at least 5 years ahead of what was on any other phone at the time, because iPhone ran OS X. Now, Apple never really called it "OS X for iPhone". Instead they called it "iPhone OS", and eventually iOS.

Looking back on it now, it's pretty clear that Apple was carving out two entirely different markets with two versions of what is essentially OS X. The one version running on the Mac, the other on their mobile devices. It becomes almost painfully obvious when looking at the current progression of both versions: The Mac version running on what Apple will soon consider the trucks of the computer industry, and the mobile version running on all the mainstream devices Apple hopes, nay, knows most of its customers will be using soon (soon being as early as this year).

If you look a little closer, you can also see where Apple wants to go but knows it can't yet. The iPad and the MacBook Air, for example. Looking at the gestures in the iOS 4.3 developer preview and the Lion preview, you can see that they're using the same (or at least strikingly similar) gestures for the same thing on both platforms: pinch with 4-5 fingers to get to the Homescreen/Launchpad, 3-finger swipe to switch between apps, 3-4 finger swipe up for Multitasking/Mission Control, even double-tapping to zoom in on web content.

Also, look at the recent benchmarks for both the iPad 2 and the MacBook Air. The lower-end MacBook air, which never really feels slow when you use it, gets about 500 ms on the SunSpider benchmark. The iPad 2, which feels even less slow, gets about 2000 ms. Apple being Apple, I'm pretty sure there's a MacBook Air somewhere in the Cupertino labs that's running on an A5 chip. And I'm pretty sure it's no slouch. I'm also pretty certain there's a similar MacBook Air, if not the same one, running iOS.

Part of the problem with that is that, when you look at the big picture, and you know (or at least hope you know) the way Apple works, you know they're wishing that the MacBook Air really was running iOS. Looking at the Lion preview, you know that's where they want things to go, but they can't. They can't just shove most of their user base onto iOS. Instead they have to settle for some sort of transitional period.

The other part of the problem is with the hardware. And I don't mean that in a "ARM is too slow" kind of way, I mean it in a "but how do you bring a touch-oriented OS (or OS variant) to a non-touch device?" kind of way. The answer, however, is "you don't". More than "you don't", but "you can't". It doesn't work like that. Apple's trying to shoe-horn it in, like they wanted to try with the old G5 chips in the PowerBooks, by bringing large multitouch trackpads into the picture but it's just not the same. It's not the same and, for lack of better phrasing, as a port of a touch OS to a non-touch device, it just won't work. Not properly, anyway, and not with the same appeal or sense of proverbial magic.

Anyone who's thought about this for more than a few minutes is aware of this problem. I'm aware of it. Most people who read Daring Fireball, listen to 5by5, etc are aware of it. I'm sure Apple's not only aware of it, but painfully slow. There are people at Apple right now losing sleep because they're aware of it, it's they're job to "fix it", so to speak, and they have no idea how. Their patent filings show you the ideas they've already tried and looked at (like the convertible iMac that flips down to become a flat touch surface), but nothing's materialized out of those ideas because even though they would work they just wouldn't work well, or they wouldn't work in an elegant, Apple-like way. It's just not ergonomic.

People often joke about Apple bringing out a larger (15" or so) iPad and calling it the Max-iPad (haha, get it?), but to be honest I think that Apple's not only looked at it (the product, not the name), they've considered it. But they ran into the same problem as with the iMac. There's no way of doing it that still feels ergonomically correct. People already complain about the iPad's weight, and it's only a little over a pound. Imagine if they were to try to do the same thing with a 13", or even 15" iPad (MacPad?). It'd be monstrous when compared to the current iPad. It just wouldn't work.

I'm sure they've thought of hinges, kickstands, even bigger Smart Covers. But none would work on a device that big. At least not well. But they want it to work. They know when they find a way to make it work (and I'm sure when they do, they'll say it in almost those exact words when presenting it) that it'll be the next big thing. It'll be where the iPad was meant to take us.

The new apps released in time with the iPad 2 show us, in software at least, where Apple wants to bring computers. Garageband and iMovie for iPad show us just how much better suited touch is, not only for apps, but for us. We want to touch things. It's how we're wired. It's how we work. When you add a translational layer, like a keyboard and mouse, you take away from the experience of doing what it is you're trying to do. Playing with musical instruments, for example. Sure, you can play with a drum machine in Flash on your browser, but it just feels so much more... right when you do it on the iPad. When you don't have access to a real drum set, it's the next best thing.

Apple doesn't want to just bring some UI elements and concepts back to the Mac. They want to bring the "magic". That's what they want to do.

But they can't. At least, not yet. But they're trying.

New Directions

I've decided to take this blog in a different direction. I don't know if I'll be keeping the old posts or not. We'll see.