Hasn’t this been obvious ever since the iPhone become popular?
Apple are very keen on The Ecosystem, because it gets people through the door and keeps them in the room. iPhone is the lowest barrier to entry into The Ecosystem, so making the Mac look and act like an iPhone makes perfect sense. And I’m ok with that. Being able to run iPad apps on my MacBook is great. Even when it isn’t a perfect experience, it’s good enough to achieve what I need to achieve.
But crucially, I can still use macOS the way I’ve used every iteration of OS X since my first MacBook in 2007. I can still do the things I need to do without the OS getting in my way the way iPadOS does. And as long as Apple maintain that distinction, I don’t really care what it looks like.
Yeah, I’m also a long time Mac user (started around the first versions of OS X, the first one I had was one of the candy-colored eMacs since they were cheap) and this convergence has been extremely obvious for a long time, but I really don’t care about it one way or the other. As long as my cli dev tools all work fine I’m a happy nerd; macOS’s selling point for me is that the GUI side is much less of a pain in the ass than Windows and more liable to Just Work™ than Linux.
And for the record, my problem isn’t that I’m a stupid Mac user who doesn’t know how to use rEaL CoMpUtErS; I ran some Linux distro or another from the 90’s up until 10 years ago when I switched to full-time macOS. I don’t have the patience to fiddle with my setup anymore, I just want an OS that gets out of my way and plays nice with my phone, and still lets me have a POSIX system with a sane cli and userland tools (and no, I’m not sold on WSL.)
Unsurprisingly I also have an iPhone, usually some old potato that I’ll swap to a marginally newer one if it breaks so badly that it doesn’t make sense to repair it (which doesn’t happen often to me.) Android always felt a bit clunky to me and I really don’t care about the customization options, so since I’m in the aforementioned Ecosystem an iPhone is a logical choice. And I do my gaming on a Steam Deck so I’ve got that side covered as well.
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