Apple created iOS because lightweight devices with a touch screen demand entirely different solutions and paradigms than mouse driven desktop applications do. They're not converging any time soon.

Let's revisit your comment in June 2011, shall we?

Absolutely, and yours as well. One of us will admit that they are terrible at understanding Apple's direction.

It's not hard to understand their direction looking at their patent filings and incremental UI updates (such as multitouch) to Mac OS X.

Although Steve Jobs isn't yet standing on stage gushing about it yet, Apple clearly plans to bring the touch paradigm to the desktop.

Interesting links: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/23/apple_filing_s... http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/10/01/apple_rumored_...

Adding multi-touch to the trackpad is one thing, assuming OS X will become touch-oriented is quite another.

iOS isn't just about touch, it's first and foremost about direct manipulation — touching the very thing you want to interact with. This paradigm does not translate well to OS X, which is mouse driven — there's a pointer between you and the thing you want to manipulate.

As for patterns, well, most of the stuff they patent never sees the light of day. Some of them are probably just red herrings, Apple prefers when nobody knows what they're doing.

But hey, let's check back in June of 2011. Looking forward to it!

Yesterday's Apple event in summary:

* Multi-touch gestures via trackpad and mouse.

* No touching the screen.

* No iOS apps coming to the Mac, instead bringing some ideas and concepts over.

* iOS and Mac OS X stay separate, ideas converge.

My take on the future of OS X; not converging with iOS. Direct manipulation touch interfaces demand different solutions than mouse/pointer-driven interfaces do.

Love the ideas they're bringing over to OS X from iOS; like instant-on, apps that resume from the state you left them in, autosaving, etc. Also love the new way you manage apps as previewed in Mac OS X Lion.

I'm curious as to why this has been downvoted so much?

It seems clear to me that if iOS device sales haven't already outsold Mac OS X computers, they will shortly, both in terms of both dollars and # of units.

It also seems pretty clear, and insiders everywhere seem to agree, that the paradigms introduced in iOS will (and already have, see multitouch) trickle into what is now known as Mac OS X.

Apparently, there are some people who strongly disagree, so what's your viewpoint?

You realize that iOS is just a stripped down OS X right?

Actually it's based on a somewhat stripped down and ARM-ized version of Mac OS X with additional frameworks (UI*) that aren't present on what's currently known as Mac OS X.

...which is exactly why the "iOS Development Environment" metaphor works! Think of it the other way round: OS X is just iOS with a lot more exposed to the user.

I think we're going to see Xcode for Windows before we see iOS running on Macs. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if there was no more Mac in five years.

So, I know Apple is making a lot of money off of iPods, iPads, and iPhones, but they still had 33% year-over-year growth in Mac sales last quarter.

I don't think the Mac is going anywhere soon. I do think we'll see substantially changes to Cocoa with a lot of things (coughbindingscough) being effectively deprecated in 10.7. I expect the next revision of AppKit to look a lot more like UIKit.