Your article nearly entirely discusses the UX of the Apple products. But an OS is more than the windowing / UX interface: An OS includes other “guts” that make a desktop/lapto computer work for users with “power apps”. And the Apple community is full of such people and use cases. Your article doesn’t distinguish between the windowing system, and the operating system — and it should.
Example: Today, audio artists depend on OS X’s amazing audio path support to be able to do real-time audio that ALWAYS plays — even if the UX appears to go south, or other applications try to hog CPU. This is because there is gorgeous logic down in the bowels of OS X that creates an amazing audio platform. This capability simply does not exist in iOS, because when Apple created iOS (by stripping the HECK out of OS X), the CPU, process management, and other kernel capabilities available in OS X weren’t left in iOS.
OS X also provides a collection of APIs for programmers that aren’t available in iOS that are important for mundane things like management of a large number of Apple computers inside an enterprise. How many of these mundane things are in the kernel of OS X and NOT in iOS?
And even attempts to merge the UX of the various platforms could have ripple effects that creates issues. There are tens of thousands of OS X applications that make detailed use of the current UX controls in OS X, many of which simply don’t have an easy analogue in a touch-driven UX. Some applications are entirely dependent on using multiple modifier keys applied to a unique UX control in order to control a capability at all (much less doing it via a keyboard shortcut). Touch-driven UX doesn’t lend itself to that nearly as easily.
In fact, I’m worried about the dumbing-down of OS X that might need to occur if Apple decides to merge the two OS’. I’m actually scared about what capabilities might disappear in order to make “V1.0” of the merged OS work. How many extraordinary OS X apps will simply barf?
So my initial reaction is this: At a minimum, please distinguish between the windowing and UX control layer of Apple OS’; and it would be better if you had a more complete analysis of the collateral impact that merging the UX of each might have on the vast array of OS X applications out there today.
