Baldur Bjarnason

... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development

These are his notes

@baldur Apple has put itself in an impossible position. It clearly sees (as MS and Google have already) that multi-paradigm apps, designed for both touch and pointer, are an economics-driven inevitability.

How it deals with that inevitability over the next few years will tell us a lot about how much it has changed since Steve Jobs' passing. Old Apple, when forced to do something like switch to Intel, didn't coast it but committed to the new paradigm and tried to become the best.

They not only made the best Intel laptops available but they made the best Windows laptops with Apple-provided dual-booting and drivers. If, as seems inevitable, apps that support both touch and pointer are the future of macOS & iOS, that should be mirrored in the OSes themselves.

iOS should be updated to support indirect pointers and macOS should be updated to support touch. And, before you point out that no OS that supports both does it well, consider that Apple doesn't have the liabilities that hold back MS's and Google's efforts.

MS's culture heavily prioritises backwards compatibility. Google is just plain bad at designing software interfaces (and I say this as a heavy Google ecosystem user). Do you really believe that Apple can't do better?.

The only real question is whether the new Apple is capable of the same paradigm shifts as the old. Steve Jobs was often described as mercurial and his Apple exhibited the flexibility that implied. I worry that Tim Cook's Apple has lost that capability.