Outside Apple’s inner sanctum in Cupertino, California, no one knows anything for certain about the future of the Mac, except that two years from now, all new Macs will be running Apple’s own Apple Silicon hardware instead of the Intel CPUs that drove every Mac produced in the past 15 years. With that one fact in mind, together with the changes Apple has made in its macOS operating system in the past few versions, it’s possible to guess what it might be like to work on the Mac of the future.
Apple Silicon and More iOS Continuity
The first and most visible sign of the Mac’s future is that Macs running Apple Silicon (such as the Macbook Air and Mac mini) M can now run almost any app written for iOS. The latest version of macOS, Big Sur, already looks more like iOS, and you can expect the two to continue to converge even more in future versions. But this is mostly cosmetic—it doesn’t significantly change the way you use a Mac in the way that Apple’s unique Continuity features affect the way you work with a Mac and your iOS devices.
Continuity features are already built into all Intel and Apple-Silicon Macs, and those features will only get deeper and more pervasive as more and more Macs are built on Apple Silicon. Right now, Continuity lets you perform feats like these: You can start a phone call on a Mac and finish it on an iOS device, or the reverse. You can snap a photo or make a sketch on an iOS device and insert it into a document on some (not all) apps on a Mac. You can send SMS text messages from your Mac through your iPhone or cellular-connected iPad. You can exchange clipboard data across devices, unlock a Mac using an Apple Watch, and use your phone to complete an Apple Pay payment on a Mac. You can also use an iPad to extend the screen on your Mac and use the Apple Pencil on the iPad screen to draw in the editing window of an app on your Mac.
I don’t pretend to think like an Apple engineer, but I can imagine that in some future version of macOS, I’ll be able to dictate a voice memo on my iPhone or Apple Watch while I’m on the road, and then, when I get back home, click a few buttons to insert the text of the voice memo into a document on my Mac. I can imagine using my iPhone to schedule backups or file uploads from my Mac.
Of course, Apple has tricks up its sleeve I haven’t guessed at, and no one at Apple is giving any hints of what they are.
Touch Screens, Rosetta, and App Compatibility
One big question about the future of the Mac is whether the OS will ever get touch screen support. I can’t claim to know the answer, but Apple has never said anything to suggest that your Mac’s display is going to be smeared with your fingerprints any time soon, so a touch-screen Mac seems unlikely.
What may be more probably, though probably distant, is a perfectly flat keyboard with virtual keys in the form of shapes that give haptic feedback. Apple started applying for patents on that kind of keyboard in 2018, but there’s still no hint that the concept will become reality. If it does, prepare to work on the thinnest laptops ever made, and hopefully it’s more of a success than the similar attempt in the Lenovo Yoga Book C930 back in 2018.
Another question is how long Apple will support the Rosetta 2 “translation layer” that lets Apple Silicon Macs run software written for Intel Macs. When Apple made the transition from PowerPC to Intel hardware, back in 2006, it introduced Rosetta, a technology that let Intel Macs run PowerPC software. The original Rosetta lasted only three years, through three versions of the OS.
I hope Apple will keep Rosetta 2 in macOS for a lot longer than three years, because many superb Intel-based apps may never be updated for Apple Silicon, now that the original authors have stopped programming for any of a dozen reasons. I’m not sure that I’ll get what I hope for, because Apple has always tended to be ruthless about killing off legacy software, but maybe Apple will get more mellow as it gets older. I can always hope.
The App Store Question
Yet another question about the future is whether macOS will ever become a closed system like iOS, which only lets you run apps downloaded from the App Store. Apple has assured developers that you will always be able to run any software you want to use on a Mac, though you may need to click a few buttons or use the Terminal to issue a few expert-level commands before some software will run.
What I’d Like to See
The future of the Mac may be this: It will become more and more like an iOS device, with the crucial exception that you’ll be able to run any software you like on a Mac, but only Apple-approved software under iOS. That’s a future I’ll be happy to live with. If, however, Apple decided to give me everything I wanted from macOS, below are three things I’d like to see.
I’ll start with the small stuff. I want more control over interface details like the color of the built-in folder icons. In the past few versions, these icons have been a blinding shade of blue. They’re less blinding in Big Sur, but still too blinding for me. I keep a lot of folders on my desktop and in the Dock, and I want to be able to look at them without blinking.
Even if I’m the only person in the world with this complaint, I imagine other people would enjoy this functionality simply because they’d like to customize their own Mac desktops. While this wouldn’t make much practical difference, I could see Apple really wowing people with some sophisticated tools that let you not only change details but harmonize them, too, with something like color lookup tables (often found in photo and video editors), which let you choose matching color profiles. You might even have the ability to download clever or even branded profiles from other sources, too.
Getting to bigger things, I want Apple to focus more on automation for nonexpert users. My iPhone and iPad now support Shortcuts that let me perform multiple actions with one click. I want my Mac to make it possible to build more flexible and customizable shortcuts. Apple tells me I can record AppleScripts to automate actions, but, in practice, I can never get a recorded AppleScript to do anything useful. Making this work more smoothly would be excellent, and by really simplifying it, Apple could give even casual user users big productivity boosts.
Finally, here’s one that digs deeper into the OS. Windows has started to support a Linux subsystem that can run command-line-style Linux apps, meaning apps that don’t display windows or other graphic elements. Macs can also run UNIX commands from its Terminal utility, but I want macOS to one-up Windows by running Linux graphical apps. And, though I know I’m asking for pie in the sky, I want macOS to build in support for something like the Wine software that makes it possible for expert users to run Windows apps in macOS as if they were Mac apps.
Those are my top three items right now. I don’t have high hopes that Apple is going to set its agenda based on my desires, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Shortcuts in the next version of macOS, making at least one of my dreams come true.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on this, and on everything Apple, in the future. For a look at the past, you can check out PCMag’s story on the turning points in the development of OS X. For my take on where macOS stands these days, read my opinion piece, How macOS Gets Almost Everything Right.
