iPhone iOS4 on a Mac?
If the new and magical paradigm of the iPad, just an extension of the iPhone, is truly the wave of the future, what are the odds that we will see that cell phone operating system appear on bigger Mac computers?
After all, it is a computer operating system, and the iPad runs it, just like the iPhone and iPad Touch, even though we have been conditioned not to call those devices computers, but rather a cell phone and a media player. The iPad, though, is another story altogether, and has most of the tools that many of us need to get through our daily computing chores. It will do email and Web browsing and content consuming and cloud applications and many of the other things that make up the bulk of our current and future computing needs. Some people, as noted in a ZDNet article, think it might happen.
And so do I. There may come a time when we are so used to the apps on our iPhone and iPad that we miss them when we are working at our iMacs or MacBooks. The iPhone development system, which runs (of course) on OS X, already has an iPhone emulator which lets you see what your raw code looks like on an iPhone. It would be a case of subtracting the development code, leaving the emulator, and letting us download apps from the App Store to our Macs, just like we do for our iPhones, Touches, and iPads now. Someone, on a lazy day in an Apple software lab in Cupertino, has almost certainly already done that.
It is just one more step in making all of our apps and lives portable. When the hardware for the Apple mobile devices becomes powerful enough, as it undoubtedly will, this migration could also happen in the other direction: OS X on your iPad or iPhone. Given the rate at which Moore’s Law improves hardware, such a move is not so far-fetched. And all of it is just a stop or two on the road to a truly portable, extremely powerful computer in your pocket. Or even smaller.
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