Not a chance. They'd lose 99% of the serious developers. I couldn't imagine doing app development without 5 terminals, photoshop, xcode, and a web browser open at the same time; running git, grep and a series of shell scripts invoking all kinds of unix tools and imagemagick and ffmpeg and so on. If iOS can ever deliver that then we've gone full circle back to macOS.
To be productive you need big monitors and overlapping windows and terminals and drag&drop, and beyond a physical keyboard you need a pointing device that doesn't require you to cover the things you are looking at with your fingers. And nobody wants to sit for 8 hours a day stretching their arms out to touch a monitor or crouch over a tablet on a table.
That would limit their dev environment to making native apps for three device classes (tablet, phone, watch). It would neglect their massive presence in the web dev community among others. Along with probably eliminating them from the university student market (as much as they're in it now). And definitely eliminate them from the enterprise market (I can almost, but not quite, get one now at work, it'd be gone for good if I only had an iPad option).
iPads make good, portable devices for a lot of things. But it'd be a foul up of epic proportions to try to move their laptop/desktop users to it.
emidln|9 years ago
0x0|9 years ago
To be productive you need big monitors and overlapping windows and terminals and drag&drop, and beyond a physical keyboard you need a pointing device that doesn't require you to cover the things you are looking at with your fingers. And nobody wants to sit for 8 hours a day stretching their arms out to touch a monitor or crouch over a tablet on a table.
Jtsummers|9 years ago
iPads make good, portable devices for a lot of things. But it'd be a foul up of epic proportions to try to move their laptop/desktop users to it.
cpncrunch|9 years ago