It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so. I've been worried since Lion that MacOS will become iOS, but with the recent changes on iPad it's clear the opposite will happen. That's why I'm getting out now. MacOS has been going downhill anyway. It still has no great way to manage windows or workspaces. It doesn't have tiling built in or even a clipboard manager. The only way to make the OS usable is turn on accessibility reduce motion, but that still doesn't allow multiple workspaces to be usable.
Not only who asked for it, but who believes it? This tired line has been the same drum for well over a decade with no proper evidence to support it other than “tHeY lOoK tEh sAmE”.
All desktop OSes are getting rid of desktop design patterns in favor of touch ones for some stupid reason. At least for Windows it can be explained by the fact that Microsoft is very desperate about putting touchscreens into everything that runs Windows. But for macOS there is no such explanation because there are no touchscreen Macs.
And yet macOS Tahoe reverses a lot of "getting rid of desktop design patterns", such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight.
Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Mac apps remain Mac apps, they retain all the aspects of their interfaces that make them Mac apps.
More evidence in the way iPadOS 26 adopts certain aspects of the macOS interface, but does them in an iPadOS-oriented way that you wouldn't really say the two OS are converging, more that they're doing really weird impressions of each other — but underneath the grease paint, the same actors as always remain, each with their strengths.
(In saying that, System Settings is an abomination)
> Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic.
Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps.
Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions. Every new UI they build and almost every old UI they redesign is just a sad vertical stack of stuff.
The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade. Tahoe further downgrades that by removing the bottom border of that top bar.
> such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight
That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one. They also made the alerts denser, reverting part of the Big Sur redesign, but, again, because they are so afraid of horizontal layout, the icon is just awkwardly above the text instead of to the left.
> Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps.
Yes, and I agree that it's bad. Though, I did say the System Settings app was crap, and it's taken a leaf from that.
To be honest, I think that Apple could do this split view settings window well in macOS. Other operating systems have had something like it for years. Apple just shits the bed repeatedly here for some reason.
> Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions.
I'll grant you this to be true. Though, I noticed this a much longer time ago than just now. Specifically, the way that they removed the context-sensitive toolbar in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers '09 and shoved it all into the sidebar. When they revealed the iPad and web interfaces, though they look similar, much of the mobile interface is actually radically different from the macOS design.
> The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade.
I'm not sure that those are particularly iPad or iOS inspired, though. That feels more like Dye doing his "trying to get rid of the UI" thing rather than anything indicating a platform merge.
That said, I'm a bit scared we'll get the iPadOS '26 traffic light window controls (that are tiny until you hover them) in macOS…
I take your point that this change was functional, not just aesthetic, but I still don't see it as part of any conspiracy to displace the Mac. Just a lack of care.
> That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one.
Ironically, it's one I can't stand! I missed being able to do the pinch gesture to bring up Launchpad and then find my app icons without having to type or scroll a ridiculously long list in a teeny tiny window.
Launchpad made sense to me, but it should've had an option to automatically sort or tidy up the icons in the style of the App Library or the new Spotlight-based interface.
Who is MacOS even for anymore though? It reminds me of the touchbar, removing ports and Macbook Pro. Know your audience. Professionals use MacOS, everyone could get by with a $200 Chromebook. Why cater to the wrong crowd.
Professionals use macOS. They also use iOS and iPadOS. I think Apple's success is their own poison in that the definition of who or what a professional is has expanded with their market share.
Yet, in their eagerness to transition their newer fanbase of loyal bicycle riders to the Mac mega-truck, they didn't so much as add oomph to the bike as attach pedals to a lorry.
It's happening. They've probably had iOS on Mac laptops for 5 years at this point. Similar to when they had been compiling MacOSX on Intel for 5 years before switching off PowerPC. The cursor on iOS on iPad is the nail in the coffin. I'll make sure to ping you when it does.
Only ping me if it's in the next five years, which was the claim from the other poster. ;-)
We have until 2030!
That said, if macOS continues to receive such shoddy treatment from its design team, I may not be using macOS by then to even care if it's going out the door. I may already be gone.
Waymo has already proven that they can drive without any human in the car. Tesla have not, at all - and as this article points out, their cars continue to make major driving mistakes, like driving into an on-coming train, running red lights, driving on the wrong side of the road. These are not subtle issues. So I see no reason to assume that they'll ever work without the human driver.
Remember also that FSD can't even be trusted to drive the 2 miles of one-way tunnel at the Las Vegas Loop - even those cars require a driver today.
It's not "Musk's argument," it's Andrej Karpathy's.
Also, if you've ever done any ML you would note that more data isn't always better. Plus there's the piece about which thing to believe when you get conflicting data. It's a lot more to it than what random Hacker News people are saying in this thread.
Conflicting data is an issue even when you just have lidar, and it's not hard to deal with.
The cofounder of Waymo taught one of the first Udacity courses on this subject. He went through a small Python project that processed lidar point clouds for self-driving. The data is noisy, you get conflicting information from different points, and the code aggregates all that into the most likely 3D model of the world.
Additional sensor inputs are just more of the same, and neural nets are pretty good at this sort of thing. They'd even learn which sensors are more reliable in different scenarios.
As for "more data isn't always better," I've mostly seen that applied to training, not inference in real-time control systems. Even for training, it turned out people had been fooled by a local maximum, and once past that, more data really was better.
They don't need Anthropic or OpenAI. Literally just go to ollama.com and throw a dart at a random model. That will be better than whatever they are doing now.
My mom does everything through voice on her iPhone. My son defaults to using Siri on Mac for a ton of things. He grew up with an Alexa. It's really the in between generation who learned how to master a computer at a young age that don't really use it.
