Snark: ENGAGED
MacOS Mojave - because every grain of sand in the desert is lethal to your keyboard. OR
Mojave - the last place in the world you can take your laptop.
Yeah, I skipped all the earlier MacOS releases because I’m allergic to cats.
iOS apps in macOS in 2019. Interesting. I wonder if that’ll just mean a company like Microsoft abandons their macOS Office suite and just focuses on iOS.
What they’re doing is making it easier to port directly from iOS to MacOS. That’s it. It isn’t running iOS IPAs directly.
There are tons of cross-platform development platforms producing native code like Flutter already. If you care about that stuff you could release your product on iOS, MacOS, Android, and Windows.
Right, OK, so the question still stands. Will Microsoft, Netflix, etc. just port their iOS apps rather than make native macOS apps? Maybe it doesn’t matter, just curious.
When you look at a giant product like Microsoft Office, the iOS version is missing metric shittons of features, so no, probably not.
For something like Netflix though, sure, why not?
Because you can just run Netflix in a browser? Why bother with an app at all on a desktop OS? Especially if that means you’re tied to Apple’s rules about revenue sharing.
Same reason people hate Electron apps, because browsers are inefficient. I use the Netflix Windows UWP app on occasion. It’s light and convenient, and I don’t need to worry about having a separate browser browfile on the right screen sized properly to watch media.
They didn’t say iOS ported apps would be limited to the Mac App Store. No reason to think you couldn’t download a DMG and drag it to the Applications folder.
As Stusser mentioned, the Office apps on iOS are barely adequate. PowerPoint is probably the best of the bunch, but Word has some basic functionality (not being able to edit styles or create Table of Contents at the least) that make it hard to use for iOS-only.
Ulysses, Things, and Affinity Photo, and some of the Omni apps are the only apps off the top of my head that treat iOS as a viable platform and create their apps accordingly.
For me, the big announcements were:
iOS: Siri quick actions. Curious to see what app developers do with this.
tvOS: Dolby Atmos and aerial screensaver info.
watchOS: Workout start/stop detection, finally! And I’m kinda interested in the Walkie-talkie feature. I wish it had an “Aliens” scanner feature where a dot gets bigger and louder as you get closer to the person you’re talking to. That would be fun to use at the mall.
macOS: Dark mode of course.
Biggest disappointment: no new hardware. I wonder if Apple is holding back new laptops to spend time redesigning the keyboard.
They could have at least updated to coffee lake CPUs. 4 real cores on a 13" MBP would be a huge improvement.
I wonder if the keyboard issue really did make them rethink the design, and they didn’t make WWDC. Or, it will get a quiet speed bump over the summer.
Hopefully they go with a CPU bump soon. The 13" MBP Is just completely non-competitive with a 7th gen CPU. Usually intel CPU generations don’t much matter, incremental improvements only, but in the mobile space this one is huuuuge.
Maybe holding off because of Spectre/Meltdown? I know not everything is going to be solved with the next processors, but why introduce new hardware with CPUs that are known to be vulnerable?
Because the current hardware is completely obsolete. Doubling the core count is, again, a huuuuuuuuge deal.
Atmos was all I wanted, happy it is coming. If you haven’t heard Atmos in 7.1.4 from quality in ceiling speakers (not bounced) you have only heard a fraction of what the format can do. Mid-atlantic east coasters that want an extended demo in central MD feel free to PM me to set an appointment to blow your minds =)
Forcing games to use Metal is sort of bad innit?
Yep, Apple has never gave a crap about games and they keep on proving it. Not that I care, I play the occasional game on it, but I keep a PC for that purpose.
Honestly outside of a few hardcore Mac only gamers (assuming they exist), I don’t see there being much outrage on this. From everything I have seen so far, no one really cares, but I am sure the Apple Reddit has a thread of outrage.
You say there aren’t many Mac gamers, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because Apple doesn’t do anything to make MacOS hospitable to games. Mac users aren’t joyless automaton non-gamers by choice.
Mac users are affluent enough to afford separate PCs specifically for gaming?