[OS X TeX] OS X and iOS Futures (was LaTeXit and Keynote 6)

[Red Roo]

I wanted to follow up on this important comment made by Herb Schulz as a side remark in another thread:
> > Le 6 nov. 2013 ? 20:46, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> a ?crit :
> In addition this looks like a troubling trend at Apple. I DON'T want my
> Mac to be an iPad with a real keyboard and no touchscreen! OS X is much
> more powerful that iOS and allows you to do many things that aren't
> available under iOS and the apps shold take advantage of that. I.e.,
> iPad apps have to be ``dumbed down'' on that platform and you shouldn't
> then dumb down those apps on the Mac for the sake of being
> ``compatible''. this kind of trend scares me.

This convergence to the LCD of OSes seems almost inevitable, given the huge burden associated with managing two complex OSes and the pull of rapidly growing profits associated with the mobile market. Personally, however, I can't envisage writing another technical book using LaTeX on an iPad; certainly not in the current state of either. Moreover, the broad appeal of Macbooks hinges on their ability to be used as Unix machines.

In that sense, I share Herb's concerns. Actually, I saw this possibility coming when iOS was first released. I was worried then that Steve Jobs might eventually let Mac support decline because of its smaller market share---as Apple has done most recently with say, Xserve.

Until I saw Herb's remark, I wasn't sure anyone else had foreseen this  problem. This raises the question, might there be some way that the MacTeX community could make this viewpoint known to the decision makers at Apple? The decisions will very likely be made sooner rather than later. 

Maybe this is already being done or done elsewhere (perhaps more directly via the OSX dev community). Or, maybe others don't see it as an important issue. But primarily I wanted to second Herb's point here, just in case, as well as find out what MacTex developers think about it.

--njg

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