[memetomancer]

I for one ain't bothered: It's clear to me that Apple needs tools to engineer these spectacular devices and there would be little or no sense to them designing away the power of MacOS and landing on a product range limited to simple consumption. Does anyone foresee a time where Apple migrates to something like Lenovo Laptops or Windows or some scraggly Linux desktop environment? Apple won't be losing these tools any time soon. At worst we might see dual mode macbooks that can be switched between MacOS and iOS paradigms.

Above and beyond that fairly self-evident conclusion, there is plenty of room for more sophisticated interaction with iOS devices that maintain the basic interface but also provide extremely sophisticated data manipulation capabilities. Perhaps even more powerfully than our beloved UNIX shells - think something like AI assisted voice interaction where you can easily state a pipeline verbally: "take results from A that contain N and modify them by X and then sort them by I and make a graph and paste it to my document". (e.g., grep | sed | sort | gnuplot | paste >> example.doc)

That sort of thing is potentially just a few iterations away and simultaneously more powerful and more useful than text mode pipes, if only for the fact that the user wouldn't be required to memorize thousands of cryptic flags/switches. The same interface could be used to string these directives together to form scripts and set jobs, etc.

This isn't meant to be a specific prediction, by the way, just one glimpse into the idea space. There are so many good ideas that people haven't had yet... it just staggers the mind to consider the potential. I'm just skimming the surface but surely there are so many ways to marry the insanely intuitive discoverability of something like iOS with the equally awesome power of the UNIX philosophy.

But it's up to us to find them, rather than get inflexible and grumbly and say it can't be done, or Apple is stupid, or whatever nonsense take you might jerk your knee towards ;)

[pininja]

I’ve pretty excited for the day I can do my programming job on an iPad in addition to my laptop. Apple has captured the software engineering market very well. Even the Microsoft F# shop I worked at had Apple hardware on most desks running Parallels or Boot Camp, and the two jobs I’ve had since were standard-issue MacBook Pro.

The pipeline you described reminds me of Apple Shortcuts - it’s easy and useful. Most recently I made a GIF out of a bunch of photos on my phone, which is a simple task that used to require a far from ideal app (ads, black-box that could be hiding analytics and tracking tasks).