Theres an awesome show called Mac Break Weekly. They were recently talking about how the mac is probabbly going to just die off because apple doesn't really care about that market anymore. What makes them money is iPhone, not the mac pro. Thats a straw man argument, but theres not a reanos for them to push mac anymore. Aside from the 5K imac there hass been no huge add on to the mac itself, though a feature I really want is that you can use the ipad pro as both a secand screen and an add on tablet for drawing stuff. Now if they wanted to do less on the OSX team ond more combine iOS and OSX to make the touch screen work, which would be the only way at this point for them to avoid their own windows 8 disaster, then it is very possible that the only OSX machines we will see are the older units, some secondary model of the macbook, and then a newline of macbooks and imacs built to compete with microsoft.
There have been some leaks that they were working with Arm chips on some form of a laptop unrelated to the T1 chip with the touchbar. What would be interesting about this is would we get an arm based laptop? And in that direction, suing qualcomm to kill that connection makes a tiny bit of sense because they need a fuck load more cash to instantly throw up a fab, and what does apple do best?
I have ome other theories, but this makes the most sense at this point. Probably in a matter of years we'll see the mac as we know it diappear, OSX will probably be dropped to open source as apple's "First step into the open development world" so they don't have to bother anymore, and we'll see a really wierd competition between apple and microsoft again. Also by then the apple EFI system will probably be dropped to open source and stuff that is still hidden and impossible to figure out for osx (switchable graphics like it my y40-70 to OSX for example) will probably be stuffed in by the hackintosh community, or whats left of it.
If OSX were to go open source, I wonder what that would do to the Linux community.
I would imagine everyone and their mother would have it on their computers. Imagine how complete of a package Mac OS (x) is and then to think that it can be opesource and available to everyone. People can then photoshop and such and do whatever else they want with AAA software, they would not need to worry about finding alternatives and such.
I can tell you that for the most part it would probably become a WIP OS like all the linuxes and normal BSD's. I personally use linux and OSX on everything. I don't think I have, currently, a windows machine. Though my streaming machine is lined up for it.
Iwould be ecstatic if this happened though. I like final cut, its easy to get FOSS software on the system, and holy shit pages. The main use of my hackintosh laptop right now is just for pages. If I could just use pages, like turn a machine on and thats the only thing it can do is pages, I would be so happy (I use Libreoffice most of the time, I'm not going to anymore).
Also @NetBandit if they added touch to just normal macs do you think they would be any better? The system i driven by icons, sure, but it would be the same as windows XP SP3 when they added touch to that. Seems like a waste to me.
No. But a lot of Mac users seem to think that would be of benefit. But they are in denial. The handwriting is on the wall. Barring some sort of black swan event, Mac is going to fade out.
