[feedmeseymour]

Whenever there is a big change by Apple, I always see a lot of relatively niche comments like this, and they're really important, IMHO.

These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry."

Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will be met by niche products; niche products that will grow concentrically, and the Apple we know now will die (has already been dying) a death of 1000 cuts, and the shell that remains will the consumer tech toy company we see taking shape now.

[mediocrejoker]

The niche market of "software developer" is in an interesting position if you include developers who create the apps that Apple needs to sell phones. Clearly "iOS app developer" is only a subset of "software developer" but I think there is only so far down the "consumer tech toy" road they can go without doing longer term damage to their ecosystem

[mywittyname]

I would think that non-iOS software developers are still a big money maker for Apple. It seems like half of professional developers use Macbooks.

[mediocrejoker]

Even though I am a non-iOSdeveloper who likes using a macbook, I can see how it would make sense for Apple to push out a small group of power users if their requirements conflict with features that enhance the experience for the majority of their users, for example something like sandboxing the entire OS away from the user. This would (ostensibly) be good for security and would only be a dealbreaker for a small minority.

As long as iOS developers aren't impacted, I'm not sure what the incentive is for Apple to allow that kind of access.

[namelost]

They could make a Linux distro, a "yellow box" for Linux. I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but if Apple really doesn't want to make computers for software engineers, it doesn't stop them making an OS for software engineers.

[phs318u]

:-)

Apple did just this, twenty years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux

http://www.mklinux.org

Interestingly, they claim to have incorporated some of the technology from MkLinux into OSX, according to this page:

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Da...

Make of that what you will.

[Baeocystin]

...and they passed that point years ago, to boot.

[saagarjha]

I don't feel that the parent comment was "niche". This argument comes up every time anyone discusses a architecture switch, and the invariable response is that Apple has already done this twice before with an emulation layer.

[ascagnel_]

And, if anything, it's easier now than in the past. Most code has been abstracted away from the bare metal, so it's more a matter of porting runtime environments over (V8, JRE, etc) than it is rewriting apps.

[mynameisvlad]

I'm not really sure how you reach the conclusions you do considering you don't know:

- Adobe's plans

- Apple's transition plans

- Really, anything other than the vague statement that Apple will start using their own chips in two years

[freedomben]

Yep, it's the slow death of the general purpose computer (Cory Doctorow reference).