What’s next for OS x?
Apple’s move to Californian place names occurred as it was running out of cats to name OS X after, and El Capitan has no shortage of possible successors: OS X Mojave, perhaps, Big Sur, Sequoia, or Tahoe. Siri will make its Mac debut in one of them, alongside further refinements of Split View (we want triple-split already), Handoff and Continuity. One tantalising prospect is MacID-style automatic unlocking and login (http://macid.co) with your fingerprint on an iOS device, or simply the presence of your Apple Watch. Reliable Wi-Fi would be nice too.
Some pundits believe that iOS and OS X will become a single OS, but Apple has poured cold water on the idea: it wants to blur the lines between the operating systems to enable seamless transitions from one to the other, but as Windows 8 demonstrated, making a single OS for both mobile and traditional devices isn’t necessarily a great idea.
That doesn’t mean OS X won’t come to ARM processors, however. When – and we think it’s a case of when, not if – future MacBooks run on Apple’s own silicon rather than Intel chips, OS X will need to run on those Macs. To quote a certain Steve Jobs from 2005: “We’ve had teams doing the ‘just in case’ scenario. And our rules have been that our designs for OS X must be processor independent… this has been going on for the last five years.” If Apple doesn’t already have ARM-based Macs running OS X, we’ll eat an iPad.