[rcarr]

Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...

[windowsrookie]

macOS has been running on A series chips since the beginning of the transition to Apple Silicon. The original developer Macs had an "A12Z" CPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

[rcarr]

TIL, very cool!

[graypegg]

IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!

[hbn]

When Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 he said it was running OSX but what that actually means is anybody's guess. iOS is closer to macOS in functionality today than the iPhone's first OS.

I personally liked iOS and macOS being separate things because making a desktop OS also work on a touchscreen has wider implications than it sounds. That's why these days everything in Windows is blown up like Fisher Price software and way bigger than necessary for a mouse cursor. Seems like that's the direction Apple is headed in anyway with Tahoe.

[NetMageSCW]

What he meant was that it was running the non-user touching parts of OS X. It was possible to SSH to an original iPhone and install gcc and compile applications. It was sort of like OS X in a kiosk mode.

[zadikian]

Only if jailbroken with openssh installed, right? The old default "alpine" ssh login

[bottlepalm]

Yep this is the biggest news. We’re one step closer to a DeX like experience for iPhone. If Apple did that they would stomp the entire Windows laptop AND desktop market.

The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!

[WatchDog]

There isn't any good technical reason why an iPad couldn't run macOS. The differences between the A and M series chips is mostly about the kinds of IO the SOC provides. The iPads already use M series chips anyway.

[freeplay]

It's been able to run on A series chips for a while. I don't think that's what's preventing MacOS on iPad. It's that the OS is not optimized for touch in any way. Too many small things to click. It's just not the kind of half-baked experience Apple would put their name behind. Likely the same reason why you haven't seen a touchscreen on a Mac.

[stetrain]

There have also been iPads running on M series chips for years now.

The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.

You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.

Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.

[zadikian]

Pretty sure this is a marketing limitation more than a technical one.

[commandersaki]

It's a shame it isn't the A19 series with MIE.