OS Xi

At 30, the device that defined Apple Computer, Inc. would be easy to dismiss in Apple, Inc’s device lineup. It accounts for only 15% of Apple’s revenue, stars in only 4 of the 30 ads and promo videos Apple’s published on their YouTube channel over the past year, and seems decidedly stuck in the past with a traditional keyboard and touchpad that fly in the face of the multitouch and sensor-orientated iOS devices. Surely it’s doomed.

And yet, the Mac itself is responsible for 50% of the profits of the PC industry, not to mention the Mac indie software market with its slew of exclusive — and profitable — professional apps from the likes of the Omni Group, Pixelmator, Panic, and more. The success of iOS devices are directly tied to Macs, since every iOS app is developed on a Mac — not to mention that once can only assume Apple’s own internal work is all done on Macs. For anyone worried that Apple will soon tire of making Macs when iOS devices are its profit center and chief source of marketshare, last year’s upgrades to Apple’s OS X apps and the new Mac Pro should at make it blindingly obvious that Apple’s still dead-set on keeping the Mac as the best PC in the market.

But what will the Mac look like, 30 years from today? Or what, for that matter, will it look like 30 weeks from today, after Apple’s likely unveiled its next annual upgrade to OS X? Will it work the same as it does today, albeit with a Helvetica Neue Thin and iOS 7 inspired refresh as so many designers have proposed over the past months?

Or will, perhaps, OS X and iOS somehow be merged, perhaps in a release I’ve enjoyed referring to as “OS Xi”? OS X Mavericks is v10.9 after all, so — baring a v10.10 release — the next version should technically be v11. To carry that moniker, one would assume that the version would be as groundbreakingly new as the first OS X release itself was — the initial version that killed Mac OS Classic in lieu of the new NeXT OS inspired UNIX-powered OS that just happened to look like a far shinier version of OS Classic. What could be more groundbreaking than a fusion of iOS and OS X? It’d kill the mouse and traditional OS X in one fell swoop, while perhaps super-powering iOS devices with more of the core OS X features professionals expect.

Except that’s not very likely to happen. Craig Federighi stated in Macworld’s Apple executive interview on the Mac’s 30th anniversary that the Mac “has been honed over 30 years to be optimal” for keyboards and mice, while further stating that it’d be a waste of time to simply add a touchscreen to a Mac, or try to fuse iOS and OS X for no reason. And the death of the Mac is out of the question, too, since Phill Schiller, in the same interview, said that “There is a super-important role [for the Mac] that will always be. We don’t see an end to that role. There’s a role for the Mac as far as our eye can see.”

Thus the Mac will live on, without merging iOS and OS X, and perhaps without a touchscreen. It’d seem obvious that it’ll get some iOS 7-style design touches, perhaps along the lines that 3rd party Mac apps like Simplenote and Fonts, or a continuation of the general less-extreme design trends — somewhat flatter, with redesigned inspectors and flatter, with larger, more graphical popover menus instead of text lists — that we’ve seen in iTunes 11, the new iWork, the Omni Group’s new apps, Capo 3, and more. Or perhaps it’ll stick with its current design, letting iOS veer off on its own design trajectory.

Step back from the bright colors and thin, Helvetica Neue Thin-esque lines of iOS 7, though, and there’s a lot of iOS specific parts of iOS 7’s design that make it what it is. Design isn’t simply the icons and colors — its the way the device experience looks and works together as a whole. Making hardware and software compliment each other has always been Apple’s specialty, far more than perfecting the absolutely most beautiful software interfaces. iOS 7, with its edge-swipe gestures to bring up the control panel or to go back in apps, uses its bright colors and thin fonts to highlight your content in a way that feels perfect on mobile.

That same look may come to the desktop, but the same feel cannot. There’s no way edge swiping from iOS could make its way to OS X in the very same way. Nor, for that matter, could iOS 7’s zoom-into-app animation that gives you a spatial feel for where you are in the OS, or the parallax animation on your wallpaper. They’re designed for the hardware and OS paradigm they work on.

OS X could, perhaps, use a similar rethinking in the way we interact with software on a traditional laptop or desktop, but those redesigns — even if they superficially look like iOS 7 — would have to be designed in a way that compliments the trackpad and keyboard if they’re to be truly influential changes. So many recent OS X changes to make the Mac more like iOS, from Notification Center and Game Center to the new Dictation before its Mavericks reinvention, are ignored by most users simply because they don’t feel perfectly at home in a keyboard+mouse environment.

And yet, that environment is still good. As Dr. Drang pointed out in his “MacBook Touch” article, the traditional computing environment affords a high level of information and control density that couldn’t be maintained if everything was increased in size to make it touch friendly. And no matter how many nifty multitasking gestures you bake into iOS, there’s nothing that’ll replace the speed of using launchers like Alfred and Quicksilver, or the text-editing keyboard shortcuts that thankfully are baked into iOS, or the simplicity of CMD+Tab to switch to another app without leaving your keyboard. The mouse and touchpad cannot go away from professional computing until someone reinvents a way to make computing without it just as powerful — and the keyboard won’t go away completely, ever.

One thing’s certain, though: Apple appreciates the role that the Mac and its unique components play in our work, and that’s refreshing to hear. I’m not against the idea of OS X becoming more like iOS, but those changes must come with an understanding of the power we get out of touchpads and keyboards. If touchscreens can productively argument or improve on that, in a way no one has done so far, then I’d be more than interested in switching, but until then, it’s nice to be reminded that the Mac is still appreciated just for being the Mac.

I’d still like to see the next version called OS Xi, though. Just because.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.