When TextMate burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s, it didn’t take aim at Emacs and Vim as much as BBEdit, a Mac-only editor around more than a decade at that point. TextMate offered radically easy ways to create sophisticated new language modules and plugins compared to most editors of the day. Mostly, though, TextMate had Ruby on Rails: David Heinemeier Hansson developed the framework with early versions of the editor, making it almost custom-built for Rails. That gave TextMate a boost working with other server-side frameworks.

Since then, cross-platform editors and IDEs like Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs have come to dominate the coding world. This is an issue for those of us who want Mac-assed Mac apps. I hung onto TextMate and then the native-but-weird Sublime Text, shifting to Code somewhat reluctantly. Last year, I pounced onto Panic’s new Nova, reviewing it positively shortly after release.

BBEdit is obviously a Mac-assed Mac app, and for reasons I’ll return to, I came back to it years ago for technical writing—but not for coding. (It sometimes seems like BBEdit’s biggest fans are writers.) Some more code-focused users, though, haven’t looked at it in years. With the release of version 14, should they reconsider?

Musty, or battle-tested?

Few editors have been around longer than BBEdit—and few have been as rock-solid. I don’t think I’ve ever lost work. It can even “rescue” never-saved documents you mistakenly close without saving!

Yet, that venerable age has become a double-edged sword. “Looks old” is a dismissal I’ve heard a lot. I’ll be honest: to me, it looks like…a text editor.

It’s information dense, but neither overly busy nor packed with unnecessary bits. (Nearly everything shown here can be turned off, too.) One thing you don’t see? Tabs. Instead, there’s an open documents list in the sidebar. If you end up with a dozen or more files open at once, this approach starts really showing its advantage.

Leaping forward

Here’s something cool:

This editor understands PHP well enough to know that after you type $handler->, it should offer methods from the Handler class as autocomplete options, because it knows $handler is an instance of that class.

This level of introspection used to be the exclusive domain of IDEs, but a couple of years ago, Microsoft introduced the Language Server Protocol for Code, so plugins could offer this functionality. Nova supports LSP natively, and with version 14, so does BBEdit. In addition to smart autocompletion, BBEdit uses language servers for:

• Function parameter help
• Real-time code linting
• Navigating to function definitions and symbol declarations
• Reformatting documents

See the green dot in that screenshot? It’s a dropdown for showing errors and warnings in a file. Individual lines also get their line numbers highlighted and the issues shown by underlines. (The snippet above shows $response with a red underline in two occurrences: the first because that line isn’t complete and so has a syntax error on it; the second because, thanks to the first error, $response isn’t defined yet.)

BBEdit is preconfigured to use many language servers, like Intelephense, out of the box once they’re installed. This can be considerably more complicated in other editors, especially if their LSP support is itself provided by an extension.

A couple of caveats: first, a lot of language servers apparently haven’t been tested with anything but Code, and can get quirky with any other editor. Sometimes BBEdit can work around quirks, but not always. Second, BBEdit doesn’t support all LSP features. For instance, documentation won’t pop up when you hover your pointer over a function or symbol.¹

Other new features

BBEdit 14 now has a “Notebook.” This takes the already-existing “scratchpad” feature (itself unique to BBEdit) a step farther, storing multiple notes as individual sheets within an always-available Notebook window. By default, BBEdit creates notes as Markdown files, but you can change them to other languages. As with any text file, you can create new notes from the clipboard or from selected text, by dragging text, or even from the shell by piping text to bbedit --note.

I haven’t played with the Notebook much yet. It strikes me as the kind of feature you’re either going to rarely use or use all the time, and it’s not clear to me where I’ll fall. I use scratchpads a lot, though, and have a weakness for note-taking apps. I could imagine putting together a package that offered some basic to-do list functionality that might effectively replace TaskPaper, too. It’s not Emacs’s legendary Org mode, but then again, it doesn’t make you learn Emacs.

Beyond that, BBEdit now supports Emmet for HTML and CSS expansion if you install the Node Emmet module; if you make from-scratch HTML pages a lot, this is a big deal. If you’re a Python programmer, BBEdit is now aware of Anaconda/Conda virtual environments out of the box, and lets you switch between them with its shell menu.

Other old features

When I became a full-time technical writer in 2014, I tried a few different editors and settled on BBEdit, even though its Markdown syntax highlighting is…spartan. Why? Because BBEdit is a Swiss Army knife, a Leatherman multi-tool, for text processing. In no particular order, here’s some interesting things BBEdit does that I rarely see in other editors.

• What it lacks in Markdown highlighting, it makes up for in Markdown previewing. You can set custom HTML templates, CSS files, and even processing scripts. (You can do this for HTML files, too, and I suspect for other kinds of plain text markup languages.)
• Many editors have a “fuzzy file open” feature, but BBEdit can open multiple matching files simultaneously. I use this way more often than you might think.
• BBEdit keeps a history of find/replace searches, and lets you save complex grep patterns with names for easy recall. And you have to see its “Multi-File Find” feature to fully appreciate how great it is.
• You can build a “text factory” of multiple actions; it’s like having a simple version of Shortcuts or Automator built right into the editor. You can save them as text filters or use them for batch processing. I have a simple-minded Markdown to BBCode conversion “script” I created this way without writing a line of actual shell script.
• You can “process” lines in a file, searching for duplicates or lines that match specific patterns (including regular expressions), and delete those lines, copy them to the clipboard, or create a new document with them.
• BBEdit can operate on “columns” of tab-separated values, cutting, copying, pasting, and even rearranging them.
• While Git support is mostly (ahem) bare bones, it’s fantastic with file-specific commands like diffs and revision history.
• The “Pattern Playground” is outstanding for constructing complicated regular expressions that work with your documents.
• BBEdit uses Kapeli’s Dash documentation browser if it’s installed.

The Unix Worksheet in BBEdit deserves its own paragraph. Send any line in the worksheet to your shell by tapping Control-Enter, and the output from the shell appears under that line in the worksheet. You can’t run interactive shell programs this way, but for most commands you now have an editable, modifiable history. In my technical writing, I create lots of local branches; I usually use a worksheet to clean them up by running git branch to get a list of them, then adding git branch -d before each one I no longer need. The worksheet is inspired by the long-defunct MPW, but Emacs fans might consider it a cousin of shell mode.

Lastly, another feature of BBEdit worth checking out: the 400-page user manual. Yes, that is what a technical writer would say, but it’s a remarkable boon.

A few missing features

BBEdit has a more “batteries included” approach than most editors, and so needs fewer third-party extensions. But, the integrated managers in Code and Nova make a strong argument for a centralized package index. Sublime Text’s Package Control started as a third-party system, so it’d be possible for someone else to take up the mantle here. The closest BBEdit has is BBEdit Extras, and while it has some good stuff, it’s also got a lot of outdated (and frustratingly undated!) stuff and an awful lot of link rot.

Sublime Text popularized multiple cursors in text editors. BBEdit’s processing commands can do nearly anything these can—honest—but if you’re a multi-cursor junkie, it’ll be an adjustment.

Codeless language modules only set colors for strings, comments, keywords and “predefined names,” along with delineating functions for navigation and folding. CLMs also can’t be used for templating systems like Jinja or EEx that exist as “embedded languages” in HTML. You can write a more powerful language definition in Objective-C—I presume including templating languages, since “PHP in HTML” and “Ruby in HTML” are standard—but that’s a hella big ask.

Back to the future

I’ve long believed that BBEdit’s balance of text processing power with discoverability and ease of use makes it the best tool for “documentation as code"-style technical writing on the market. But at least for me, it hadn’t kept up with the state of the art for coding. With BBEdit 14, this no longer feels true.

So, I’m moving back. I’ve created a new color scheme, SpaceBones, inspired by the default color scheme of Spacemacs. I’ve been working on an up-to-date package for Elixir that comes with an LSP, as well as creating a new set of clippings for PHP 8. My old Editor Actions package may get a reboot. Hopefully, there will be ways to publicize these; I’d love to see a BBEdit-focused project similar to Vim Awesome.²

If you’re already a BBEdit user, version 14 is an essential update. If you’re not—whether you used it years ago but drifted away, or never used it at all—it’s time to give it another look.

BBEdit 14 is $49 new from Bare Bones Software, with upgrade discounts for owners of earlier versions, or from the Mac App Store with a $39/yr annual subscription. You can use BBEdit for free with a more limited feature set. Disclosure: I beta-tested BBEdit 14, and received a free upgrade serial code.

TL;DR: I’m not using it much.

I’m sure my review of Nova made it clear that I wanted to like this editor a lot. In practice, though, it’s felt more like its predecessor Coda and a similar competitor of Coda’s era, Espresso, than like Visual Studio Code or BBEdit: targeted chiefly at web developers mucking about with static websites. (Which, to be fair, is a sizable audience; my website is static, and Nova’s pretty good with it.)

Nova’s built-in smart autocompletion hasn’t proved particularly smart when I’ve been using it, which in some ways makes it more frustrating than not having it at all. Backing it with a language server theoretically improves it, but Nova’s LSP support is fragile and weird. I don’t mind it being somewhat incomplete, but it’s entirely dependent on third parties writing extensions that talk to language servers—which would be fine if they worked. But at least in the languages I use, they don’t. For PHP, there are two wrappers for Intelephense; one just flat out doesn’t start, and the other one makes Nova crash on startup. For Elixir, the elixir-ls extension works in the sense of, you know, not crashing, but mostly what it seems to do is hover huge documentation pages over the screen if the mouse pointer rests over an Elixir keyword. (I have heard Nova’s TypeScript extension is solid, but I haven’t tried it.)

Beyond that, when it comes to the basics of just editing, Nova is…fine? It does the job. But—like Coda and Espresso—it doesn’t have the selection and manipulation chops of higher-power editors. I still have no idea what commands like “Select All in Any Scope” are supposed to do because they’ve never worked. Nova’s clips are useful, but limited compared to the equivalents in BBEdit or Code (or any editor, like Code, that basically adapted TextMate’s snippets).

So, am I going to renew for the $49 annual subscription? I haven’t entirely ruled it out, but, well, it’s not looking good. I’ve been spending much more time back with BBEdit recently…but that’s another article.

So, what is it?

Music mixed in Dolby Atmos.

So, like, surround sound?

Yes, with an asterisk we’ll come back to. Most surround systems use multiple channels: the original Dolby Surround used four (left, right, center, and rear), then moved to five (splitting the rear into left rear and right rear), and a few Even More Channels variants. Dolby Atmos, though, doesn’t have channels. Instead, it assigns audio tracks to “audio objects,” which have three-axis positions in virtual space. Each object has metadata that says, “this object should sound like it’s coming from a point this far between the left and right walls, this far between the rear and front walls, and this far between the floor and ceiling.” When you play the Atmos soundtrack, the decoder—called a “renderer” by Dolby—knows how many speakers it has available in the room and their positions within 3-D space, and it maps the audio objects onto specific speakers at specific values. It’s remixing the audio to match the playback environment on the fly, with as high fidelity to the original audio object positions as possible.

That’s pretty cool! What about, uh, not movie theaters?

The home version of Atmos works essentially the same way, just mapping to fewer speakers—typically just five, although you can get fancy and go up to eleven.

Is that a Spinal Tap reference?

If you want.

So how do you get all that fancy three-dimensional positioning with only two speakers, or a pair of headphones?

Congratulations, you’ve found that asterisk I said I was going to come back to!

Yay! Explain.

For headphones or any other two-channel system, Atmos positional data has to be down-mixed into two-channel audio. If you want to hear Atmos music with the highest fidelity to the recording, you’re going to need to play it over a system with at least four physical speakers. As far as I know, the only way to do that with Apple Music is to use an Apple TV box: it outputs Dolby Atmos over HDMI.

So it’s all a lie!

Well, not so fast. What Dolby Atmos does for Headphones is render binaural audio. Binaural audio is, per Wikipedia, “a method of recording sound that uses two microphones arranged with the intent to create a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments.” Basically, the theory is that we only have two ears, yet we can clearly hear when sounds are up, down, front, or back, not just left or right. In theory, two channels should be enough to capture full positional information if we record the sound properly.

So: when there’s only two speakers to output to, the Atmos renderer takes each Atmos audio object and calculating volume and left/right panning settings to synthesize a binaural mix. All the positional information is still used.

Is it better stereo, or just different?

That’s hard to answer. First off, you may not hear much difference between binaural stereo and normal stereo. I hear what audio nerds call a “wider soundstage,” but I rarely think sounds are in front of me or behind me. Occasionally, I get that “enveloping sound” sensation they talk about, but I can also get that from a good normal stereo recording. In my experience, I’m more likely to get it from a pair of great full-range speakers than from headphones. From what I’ve read, I’m not an outlier here; the truth is that most people just don’t have great speakers.

That’s very audiophile snob of you.

Sorry.

You said “first off.” Second?

Second, the original multichannel Atmos mix just might not be as good, at least subjectively, as the stereo mix. Tracks are definitionally going to be placed differently, and you might find some are overemphasized or underemphasized to your tastes. This gets even more complicated if you’re listening to headphones, because you’re relying on the Atmos renderer to synthesize the binaural mix.

So is this an Apple exclusive thing? Apple talks about it like they’re doing amazing things nobody else has.

Apple talks about everything that way. Atmos Music has been a thing since at least 2017, and TIDAL and Amazon Music already stream it. When Apple says they’ve been working with studios on this, I have a suspicion that what they mean is “Dolby has been working with studios on this.” I haven’t seen any indication yet that Apple’s getting exclusive tracks and deals.

Huh. So what does any of this have to do with AirPods “Spatial Audio”?

Apple seems to be using that to describe two unrelated things:

• Their own clever synthesized binaural audio that they use with video playback, which only works between iOS and AirPods Pro and Max. This considers your physical position relative to the playback device when it’s calculating the binaural audio effects, making it seem like the “front center channel” is right where the video is playing regardless of your head’s position.
• Apple branding for Dolby Atmos music.

So does Spatial Audio work in Spatial Audio?

Come again?

Does the Dolby Atmos “Spatial Audio” music play back on AirPods Pro and Max using “Spatial Audio”?

Oh, gotcha! No.

Argh.

But, an Apple tech note says it’s coming “this fall,” which seems to mean “with iOS 15.” A friend with the developer beta says it’s already working in that release, and that when she turns her head she can sense the instruments “moving” on the soundstage. This suggests the Atmos binaural rendering is being reconfigured on the fly by dynamic head positioning.

If (Atmos) Spatial Audio isn’t (Apple) Spatial Audio, can I listen on non-Apple headphones and speakers?

Yes. If you’re using an Apple TV box, then It Just Works™. Otherwise, you’ll need to go into the Music app’s settings and set Atmos to “Always On” rather than “Automatic.” Apple Music warns that isn’t “supported” on all speakers, but I would read that as a warning that it may not sound good on all external speakers—remember, the Atmos binaural rendering happens in Apple Music itself. It should be fine on any decent headphones, though.

So is this really the future of music?

If anyone can finally make multichannel audio mainstream, it’s Apple, but that’s a big if—the consumer audio market has been rejecting multichannel audio for going on five decades. We’re going to have to wait a few years to see if “3-D music” really takes off, or if it goes the way of 3-D movies.

So what’s the deal?

Apple Music can now stream files as “lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 48 KHz sampling rate (which is better than CD quality), or “hi-res lossless,” up to 24-bit resolution and a 192 KHz sampling rate.

Does that really make music sound better?

Depends on who you ask and what your equipment is. I feel like I can often hear a difference between CD quality and “lossy” encoding, but not reliably. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a difference between hi-res and CD quality that couldn’t be attributed to remastering, which gets into a whole different subject.

You said “feel.” Isn’t that very subjective?

Yes.

Have you gone through scientifically sound ABX testing, ideally in a soundproofed room and conducted by qualified audio engineers?

No.

I sense you are not interested in this argument.

You are correct.

Okay, so let’s talk about Apple Music specifically. Can I get lossless quality over any Apple AirPod?

No. There are no lossless Bluetooth codecs.

How about the HomePod?

Not yet, but it’s promised for later.

The Apple TV?

Yes, but not at hi-res, and it appears to be locked at a 48 KHz sample rate. (Some lossless music Apple has is likely at a 44.1 KHz sample rate, the same as CDs.)

Okay, so it’s best on the Mac.

Well, two caveats. One, you’ll probably need an external DAC (digital to analog converter) to get better than “lossless” quality. Two, Apple Music doesn’t do output bit rate switching.

What’s that mean?

The music files have sample rates they’re encoded with, and your computer sends data to either its internal or your external DAC at a specific sample rate. Ideally, those two rates should be the same, and most “audiophile” music players match them automatically. Apple Music on the Mac doesn’t. It uses whatever bit rate the output device happens to be set at when the Music app launches. If that bit rate doesn’t match the music it’s playing, the music will be resampled to match the output rate.

If it’s resampled, is it still lossless?

If it’s resampled down, say from 96 KHz to 44.1 KHz, then definitionally, no. If it’s resampled up, say from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz, the answer is murkier; no data gets lost, but new data has to be synthesized.

How do I fix that?

A few approaches off the top of my head:

1. Check what you want to play before playing it and set the output rate in Audio MIDI Setup. Music will only show you the sample rate for “hi-res” music, but anything that’s listed as an “Apple Digital Master” or whatever they’re calling it this week is probably 48 KHz. This is arguably bad advice.
2. Enable “lossless” but not “hi-res” in Music, and use Audio MIDI Setup to set the output at the highest bit rate and sample rate your DAC has. This is arguably less bad advice, although it’s still not ideal.
3. Subscribe to TIDAL.
4. Listen on iOS.

Wait, are you saying that iOS does do sample rate switching?

Yes.

Why doesn’t the Mac?

The Music app on the Mac is really still just iTunes. Internally, iTunes is, if you will forgive the technical jargon, a trash fire.

You mentioned TIDAL. Does it do sample rate switching on the Mac?

Yes. As much as TIDAL gets made fun of, it’s got a decent app, and TIDAL Connect, like Spotify Connect, is arguably better than Apple’s AirPlay for getting home audio devices to stream music. But its lossless tier is $20 a month and its radio stations and curated playlists are noticeably worse than Apple Music’s.

What about Spotify and Amazon HD Music?

I don’t know. Like Apple Music, though, they’re more “consumer-oriented.”

What about Qobuz?

Gesundheit.

So what are you personally doing?

For my desktop, I’m following #2 above. My computer speakers (Vanatoo Transparent One Encores) have a USB DAC built into them. For my living room system, I can use the Apple TV, but compared to Spotify or TIDAL Connect—both of which work natively on my A/V receiver—it’s a little fiddly.

I read on a website that the best music quality possible is from MQA, “Master Quality Authenticated,” files. Does Apple Music support that?

Please stop reading that website.

If I play Apple Lossless over $200 AudioQuest Carbon USB cables through a $10K Luxman L-509x amplifier connected to Wilson Audio’s $48K Alexia speakers via $4000 Cardas Clear speaker cables (terminated in spades), will it sound great?

Probably.

Basecamp is both the name of a small tech company and their primary product, a web-based project management tool that includes forum-like message boards and a Slack-like chat component. It’s pretty good. (So I’ve heard.) In some ways, Basecamp is actually more famous for Ruby on Rails, the web framework they created for Basecamp. And, they’re famous for having capital-O Opinionated leaders, who recently banned “societal and political discussions” on the company Basecamp—essentially the equivalent of saying “no politics on the internal Slack”:

Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.

So.

Basecamp’s post has provoked predictable outrage on Twitter, and, well, duh. Twitter is outrage’s natural habitat, where nothing is worth stating if it can’t be stated in the most extreme form possible. But pop quiz: what does “politics at work” mean to you?

1. Facing fraught but important questions about company policies and culture, including pay equity, hiring practices, workplace behavior, and even the ethics of the work being done and for whom.
2. A continual verbal slugfest among coworkers who seem more interested in pwning one another for their terrible viewpoints than coming to any understanding.

It’s clear from the text of their post that Basecamp wants to stave off the latter. And, y’know, that’s not unreasonable. I’ve had coworkers with political views I absolutely didn’t share, and we could still, well, work together. There was no explicit ban on politics; we just understood that it’s not something one gets into with coworkers.

The problem, though, is that shutting down the latter all too often means ducking the former. Suppose your company supports a politician pushing policies that would benefit the business directly; aren’t they now indirectly supporting every other policy that politician’s pushing? What if it comes out that one of your customers is a neo-Nazi network? Why does your company have only one woman and zero Blacks in its twenty-person engineering team? Why did that trans customer support engineer quit after only four months?

Again, I think—at least, I’d like to—that Basecamp’s intended message was keep company chat channels civil and focused on work. But if that’s what they meant, that’s what they should have said. By saying “no politics,” what they’ve communicated is don’t ask uncomfortable questions about our workplace culture.

Maybe they shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it makes them complicit, or if wading into it makes them a target. But they’ve tried to have it both ways. That guarantees the answer to both of those questions is yes.

Postscript: Literally just after I wrote this, I came across Jane Yang’s open letter to Basecamp’s founders, a brilliant—and depressing—read that makes me rather less sanguine about Basecamp’s intent.

At the end of 2010, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote in a Macworld column,

The central conceit of the iPad is that it’s a portable computer that does less—and because it does less, what it does do, it does better, more simply, and more elegantly. Apple can only begin phasing out the Mac if and when iOS expands to allow us to do everything we can do on the Mac. It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.

Back then he wrote that long-term (“say, ten years out”), iOS might replace macOS. But in 2020, Apple recommitted to the Mac: the Mac Pro, the return of good keyboards, and—the biggest move yet—a new CPU architecture designed in-house.

Since then, I’ve seen a chorus of pundits, both professional and armchair (hi), push two theories that are either at odds or entwined, depending on how you look at them:

• Surely, a dystopian iOS-like future of only sanctioned App Store purchases lies ahead for the Mac. (Let’s call this the “Hacker News bait” narrative.)
• Surely, the iPad is going to catch up or even surpass the Mac—it already does so many things so well, and it’s only held back from its potential by an OS with artificial limitations.

The Hacker News bait narrative is bullshit. But I’m not sure about that second, sunnier one, either. Apple has been demonstrating a consistent philosophy for over a decade:

• Macs are general purpose computers.
• iPads and iPhones are application consoles, analogous to game consoles.

These have been true from the beginning of each platform. Macs have always been general purpose computers, and iPhones and iPads have never been such.

There’s no intrinsic reason iOS devices had to be consoles; other smartphones like Windows Mobile and PalmOS phones weren’t. We all know that, but we forget that there’s also no intrinsic reason Macs had to be open. Not only was its direct antecedent the Xerox Star considerably more console-like, so was Jef Raskin’s original concept for the Macintosh, which evolved into the Canon Cat. Yes, if the Mac had been positioned as an appliance the way the Star and the Cat were, it would likely have joined them in obscurity—but we say that now with nearly four decades more “common wisdom” about computers. The Cat wasn’t the only early attempt at an application console; the 1990s saw the Sony eVilla and other “Internet appliances.” Those products didn’t fail because the concept was bad; they failed because the technology to support the concept just wasn’t there yet. A decade later, we had small, lightweight touch screens and widespread high-speed wireless data—and internet appliances became possible.

As long as this philosophy on Apple’s part holds—and there’s no evidence that it’s changing—macOS will never be locked down to the degree iOS is, i.e., unable to install non-App Store apps without jailbreaking. But the Venn diagram of “users likely to walk over such a drastic change to the Mac” and “users likely to spend boggling amounts of money on Apple hardware” is close to a perfect circle. Apple would have to not only make up the lost hardware revenue in App Store revenue but beat it. You need 30% of a hell of a lot of apps to make up for a single lost 16-inch MacBook Pro sale, let alone a Mac Pro. Even if it was just four or five percent of users—and I think that’s extremely optimistic—that’s millions of lost unit sales, and likely forgoing entire markets the Mac currently has a meaningful presence in. There’s just no business case for such a move. Beyond that, given all the radical changes Apple made to the Mac in 2020, it feels like that was the “now or never” moment. If M1 Macs and macOS Big Sur didn’t lock us into an App Store-only world, it’s pretty unlikely macOS Pismo Beach or whatever is going to.

But that brings us to the second point. Is this the year when the iPad does get to do everything, not just most things, the Mac does? Will we be able to run macOS apps on M1 iPad Pros the way we can run iOS apps on M1 Macs?

I do think Final Cut and Logic will come to the iPad eventually in some form. But so far, macOS has remained a general purpose OS, and iOS has remained a console OS—and I don’t think that’s changing soon. I just don’t. I’m doubtful that Apple has any interest in getting an Xcode-like iPadOS development going, and doubtful they plan to “open up” iOS any more than they must for technical, market, or regulatory reasons.

Yet on an infinite timescale, this dichotomy can’t hold. It may be a minority of people who truly can’t do their work on the iPad, as opposed to just kvetching that they can’t do it the same way as they do on a Mac or a PC. But that minority is there, and they matter.¹ So the question is what happens to break it and when. I’m expecting iPadOS 15 to have some major UI changes, possibly even the first tiling window manager designed for humans. My pie-in-the-sky guess is that a new operating system replacing both macOS and iPadOS is already underway. Its foundations are Swift and SwiftUI, and macOS Big Sur and iPadOS 15 are early bits of scaffolding. The Mac gets lighter; iOS gets heavier. But they’re not meeting in the middle yet.