Veteran software developer Brent Simmons, of Radio Userland, NetNewsWire, and OmniGroup fame:
That’s not the thing about iOS devices. They’re great for a whole bunch of other reasons: convenience, mobility, ease-of-use.
You can do some surface-level automation, but you can’t dig deep and cobble together stuff — crossing all kinds of boundaries — with some scripts the way you can on a Mac. They’re just not made for that. And that’s fine — it’s a whole different thing.
In a way, it feels like iOS devices are rented, not owned. This is not a criticism: I’m totally fine with that. It’s appropriate for something so very mass-market and so very much built for a networked world.
Meanwhile, the iOS triumphalists are saying that we should welcome the end of the revolution.
People will probably tell me it’s generational. And maybe it is. But if we don’t have this power that is ours, then I don’t actually care about computers at all. It meant everything.
Jason Snell, famously of MacWorld and now an independent media producer, on the convergence of iOS and macOS:
This is the way it’s always been, more or less—but all of a sudden it’s started to feel archaic. I value my Desktop as a collection of in-progress files, and some manual organization feels useful, but for the most part using the Finder feels like fiddly non-work, like rearranging your desk or reorganizing your bookshelf as a way to procrastinate before getting back to your actual work.
Using iOS has made me appreciate its more app-centric view. To access my current story list on the Mac, I generally go to the Finder, make a new window, and click on a shortcut in the sidebar to view a particular Dropbox folder. Yes, I could place an alias out on the desktop, or use a tool like Default Folder to force the default view of BBEdit’s File > Open command to the proper folder… and, come to think of it, I might start doing that, since it is closer to how iOS does things. On my iPad, I open 1Writer (my iOS text editor of choice) and use a sliding pane that displays the contents of that same Dropbox folder. Tapping the icon to create a new file creates it, by default, in that folder. I never need to leave 1Writer to open, create, rename, or email a file.
The Mac is becoming more like iOS–and I like it (Macworld)
It’s hard for me to land on one side of this or the other. Every time I use iOS on the iPad Pro, I think how much I like it and how it could–with some tweaks and additions–become my everyday platform.
But every time I come back to the Mac after an iOS jag, I realize how much I value using macOS, like LaunchBar, which extend the mac’s core power, to using applications such as DEVONthink and MailMate, which don’t have directly reproducible experiences on iOS.