Inside the iPhone: Mac OS X, ARM, and iPod OS X
Slashdot presented Macworld: Ten Myths of the Apple iPhone next to several gloom and doom reports by analysts who fell all over themselves to explain why Apple's new iPhone was nothing to get excited about. Those critics have been fairly quiet about the iPhone’s use of OS X however. What does it mean for users?
Mac OS X vs OS X?
A few readers have jumped on the detail that Apple seems to be consistently referring to the iPhone as running "OS X," not "Mac OS X." This does seem unusual, because Apple has never referred to Darwin, the open source portion of Mac OS X--or any other subset of its OS--as anything other than "Mac OS X."
In fact, it does not even seem sensical for Apple to point out that the iPhone is running "Mac OS X" and then leave out the Mac. Apple is obviously intending to focus attention on the use of its own OS in powering the device, or it would have kept the detail a secret. On the Macworld show floor, Apple representatives did not seem to pointedly distinguish between the the two phrasings. Is there a difference?
What purpose is there in referring to two related OS products under different names? If Apple hopes the iPhone will offer an additional peripheral marketing halo that sells more of the company's Mac computers, then Mac is the brand name Apple should be advertising.
Microsoft has intentionally referred to its various operating environments under the brand Windows, despite the fact that its Windows 95, Windows NT, and Windows CE products lines are all significantly different systems. The majority of users don't know or care that there is a difference, they only know that if it says "Windows" then it must be safe to buy, because the word has been advertised far more than even Intel's "Pentium" brand.
That being the case, it appears that it's a bit excessive to extrapolate any difference. Even Apple's own Developer Connection web page, the metadata description of the page (which shows up in Google search) is worded:
"Apple's developer resource for Mac OS X. Contains guidelines, tutorials and API information for new OS X developers."
Either Apple is using "OS X" inconsistently, or the difference in phrasing does not mean anything special when applied to the iPhone.
ARM, and Pulling a Leg
John Gruber of the Daring Fireball recently posted the article At ARM’s Length, which pointedly states that “Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing,” suggesting that Apple is indeed being inconsistent and has mind bogglingly decided to use “OS X” to refer to the version running on the iPhone.
Gruber also says that the iPhone is not powered by an Intel processor, but rather an ARM processor, and seems to suggest that this represents some new epoch for Apple, as if the company hasn’t used ARM since the Newton.
Surely he knows that Apple has been using ARM processors in the iPod from the beginning, and that Intel makes a lot of ARM processors under the brand XScale, which power everything from the Blackberry to many WinCE PDAs, Palm Treos, and Creative Zen music players.
Intel recently decided that it was no longer interested in the PDA processor market, and sold off its XScale operations to Marvell last June. Intel still builds XScale processors for Marvell however.
That creates a picture that seems to suggest that Apple has ported Mac OS X to the ARM architecture for the iPhone, and that Apple will confusingly call the ARM version “OS X” to distinguish it from the version running on Intel Macs.
Porting Mac OS X to ARM would make a lot of sense; referring to it as “OS X” ... not so much. What are you thinking Apple?
OS X: the Secret iPod OS?
It is actually possible that iPods have used a subset of Mac OS X code for some time already, in secret. Apple has never made any comment on what operating system existing iPods run, ever since the company moved from Pixo, the operating system that ran the very first iPods.
That would parallel Apple’s secret internal maintenance of Mac OS X on the Intel architecture, which wasn’t disclosed until the company decided that developers should know about the arrival of new Intel Macs... six months in advance, at WWDC 2005.
Now, six months ahead of the iPhone’s release, Apple may similarly be ready to reveal a parallel secret: that Mac OS X software, ported to the ARM processor architecture, has actually powered iPods for years.
Making that information public now would only be necessary if Apple decided that it was the time to open development for the iPod family, starting with the iPhone. Up to this point, iPod development has been shrouded in secrecy, with only a select few developers allowed the details needed to produce 5G iPod games.
The internal structure of iPod games suggests that at least the 5G iPods use an Apple designed, custom system. It would make sense that Apple would attempt to reuse as much code as possible from existing development on Mac OS X. Will Apple release, as a familial companion to Mac OS X, an iPod OS X?
OS X on the iPhone
At Macworld, a number of people asked if the iPhone ran "the full Mac OS X." One smart alec answer was: do you see a Dock? Photoshop? A Trash can?
Actually, it's quite obvious that the iPhone is not running the exact same version that comes in the Tiger box. The real questions are: how much is missing, and what difference will it make to users and developers?
Among Apple's own bundled apps, there are obvious departures designed to suit the iPhone's screen size and other hardware differences. The most obvious is the lack of a regular Mac Finder with a messy Desktop, a Dock, or a disk icon full of items representing files and folders.
In place of the Finder is a home page: a grid of launcher icons reminiscent of a Palm Pilot... or the Newton.
A Reinvented Finder
Unlike Microsoft and Windows CE, Apple knew better than to just cram the existing Mac Finder and desktop into a small screen for a handheld device.
With the iPhone's launcher, each application is easy to get to; with the single physical home button on the face of the iPhone, the launcher is easy to return to as well.
This makes a lot of sense, particularly when seeing first hand how easy this design makes it to navigate into a function, such as selecting a photo to email, and then jump back home to the launcher to do something else.
Despite losing the Finder, key ideas are retained on the iPhone that will be familiar to Mac users. Along the bottom of the home screen is an iconic list of its four principle functions: phone, mail, web, and iPod.
These work similar to the Dock; when a call is in progress, the phone icon blinks to let you know you've got an call. When you have voicemail or email, the phone or mail icons get a badge showing how many messages are new, just like iChat and Mail icons in the regular Dock.
Anyone unfamiliar with the Mac OS X Finder won't be lost on the new device, but iPhone users are clearly being lead toward using Macs.
This device is no doubt designed to wean people off of the Start Button, and teach them the meaning and value of an intuitive interface that actually makes sense. As they say: once you go Mac, you don't go back.
Mac OS X Software on the iPhone?
Stepping beyond the Finder, it's also clear that existing Mac OS X applications would also need significant retooling in order to work on the iPhone. But how much? How many applications would even make sense to run on the handheld device?
Apple left plenty of room on the iPhone's home page menu for new icons, and a 4 or 8 GB device should have plenty of reserve capacity to load lots of new apps. Applications are certainly much smaller than the movies or albums it is also designed to store.
So what capacity will the iPhone have to run new apps, and will Apple let anyone make them? I'll take a look in the next article.
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Saturday, January 13, 2007
