From what I've been hearing lately about Apple, the impression I keep getting is that Apple doesn't think of Mac as a product with a specific target market, but more as a sort of just-a-really-really-big-ipad.
As a long-time Mac user who's still basically happy with the product, this is what worries me the most long-term. YMMV, different strokes, go in peace with Ubuntu, but for me personally, macOS has been my favorite desktop Unix, hands-down, for about fifteen years. There's nothing that I want to do on even a semi-regular basis that I can't do, and a lot that would require, well, heavy adjusting if I moved to Linux. (Yes, I've used Linux within the last couple of years.)
I also love iOS and the iPad, but it's not a general computing platform; it's a computing appliance. It's very good at what it does, but by design it's difficult-to-impossible to do things on it that Apple doesn't want you to in ways that aren't true for macOS. (I'm sorry to those of you who had to disable SIP to recompile your own version of Apache, or who are infuriated you can't replace Finder with ratpoison, but you know that's not what I'm talking about here, right?) If "Project Marzipan" is about creating a new UIKit/AppKit hybrid that allows developers to create codebases that run on both iOS and macOS, that's already a little worrisome; if it's about "letting iOS apps run on macOS," as some of Gurman's reporting has it, that's a lot worrisome. I have a lot of apps that exist for both macOS and iOS, and in every single case, the macOS version is more capable. And iOS's "sandbox everything" model--and, I suspect, attitudes it engenders--make every app feel like an island not just in terms of data but in terms of functionality: there's much less of the "learn the basics of one app, learn them all" feeling that makes macOS, well, macOS.
If the Mac line moves to Apple's A-series chips, that's...not necessarily bad, but if it's being done in conjunction with sweeping software changes, it makes me extremely uneasy about the line's future in a way that even the Touch Bar doesn't (and trust me, I do not take the Touch Bar as a good sign). I'm not planning to switch platforms any time soon, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should buy an inexpensive Linux-compatible laptop so I can, you know, practice. Just in case.
I'm not too worried about Marzipan in the short term, I'm thinking the goal of that project might be to get devs who make pro apps on the mac side work on a codebase that they could easily port over to the iPad side seen as the iPad Pro is seriously lacking in app support compared to the Mac, because it's unprofitable to maintain them.
In the long term this is a play to push Cook's iPad Pro post-pc idea, yet again...
As a long-time Mac user who's still basically happy with the product, this is what worries me the most long-term. YMMV, different strokes, go in peace with Ubuntu, but for me personally, macOS has been my favorite desktop Unix, hands-down, for about fifteen years. There's nothing that I want to do on even a semi-regular basis that I can't do, and a lot that would require, well, heavy adjusting if I moved to Linux. (Yes, I've used Linux within the last couple of years.)
I also love iOS and the iPad, but it's not a general computing platform; it's a computing appliance. It's very good at what it does, but by design it's difficult-to-impossible to do things on it that Apple doesn't want you to in ways that aren't true for macOS. (I'm sorry to those of you who had to disable SIP to recompile your own version of Apache, or who are infuriated you can't replace Finder with ratpoison, but you know that's not what I'm talking about here, right?) If "Project Marzipan" is about creating a new UIKit/AppKit hybrid that allows developers to create codebases that run on both iOS and macOS, that's already a little worrisome; if it's about "letting iOS apps run on macOS," as some of Gurman's reporting has it, that's a lot worrisome. I have a lot of apps that exist for both macOS and iOS, and in every single case, the macOS version is more capable. And iOS's "sandbox everything" model--and, I suspect, attitudes it engenders--make every app feel like an island not just in terms of data but in terms of functionality: there's much less of the "learn the basics of one app, learn them all" feeling that makes macOS, well, macOS.
If the Mac line moves to Apple's A-series chips, that's...not necessarily bad, but if it's being done in conjunction with sweeping software changes, it makes me extremely uneasy about the line's future in a way that even the Touch Bar doesn't (and trust me, I do not take the Touch Bar as a good sign). I'm not planning to switch platforms any time soon, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should buy an inexpensive Linux-compatible laptop so I can, you know, practice. Just in case.