In *2018* I tweeted about my exhaustion with the “forever transition”: this perpetual state of “bare with us”. We have to use these inbetween states for years, they’re not free. At some point we started treating entire product cycles as betas. (Thread)
And for what — I’m not seeing the unification that matters to me, a unification of UX, a vision of how we should *use* our computers, all I see a unification of component pipelines or perhaps arbitrary refactoring of internal shared components of academic interest.
I keep harping about this but it matters: 10 years after the iPhone the “unification” we’re getting is the one that matters least: the chip architecture. Remind yourself of the excitement from hearing iPhone ran OS X. We’re you excited about potentially sharing instruction sets?
Or were you excited that perhaps this revolutionary new way of fundamentally interacting with technology could be making its way to the Mac? Remember wondering when you’d be able to touch your screen just like the iPhone 10 years ago?
I know that we’ve been disappointed so long that that dream has been beaten out of us, but that was the future worth investing in. Not some “technically correct” argument that you can build apps “like on iPad” using Catalyst.
Apple spends almost no time considering or discussing the why of iPad vs Mac with Catalyst, just the “how”. This is because there is no “why”. There’s no good answer other than “historically the iPad has a touch screen but no keyboard, the Mac no touch screen”.
In 10 years it seems no one has asked, “Sure this is how these products happen to exist today, but if we were starting from scratch with these base components, is this how we’d make them? Did we coincidentally arrive at the right differentiation by luck?”
Transitions aren’t essentially bad & they *can* be a way of life if they feel earned. The next 2 years feel static. Everyone’s gonna be figuring out ARM or whatever. That’s nothing like how I’d feel if we’d all be embarking on the journey of integrating touch into our Mac apps.
