Is OS X going to be iOS Desktop?

I’ve been saying this for a while, and now I can see some others starting to say it too.  The future of OS X and iPhone OS is convergence.  Could the name change from iPhone OS to iOS be the first step towards this unified future?  Actually, I should say re-unified as iPhone OS is an offshoot of OS X.

Do you remember when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone?  He said and I quote “it runs OS X”.   Today I ran into the first rumors about a touch enabled iMac.  I believe we are still a long way from reaching the point where Apple will announce this, as I believe that what is required for that is a version of OS X that can run both regular Mac applications and iOS applications.

I might be wrong though as I had never considered the possibility that Apple might have been developing OS X for Intel processors right from the beginning as a “Plan B” sort of strategy.  Being able to do keep that quiet for five years was truly amazing.

Merging the operating systems makes sense if you see OS X as a superset of iOS.  If OS X can do everything iOS can an then some, you will have a sudden influx of new and interesting applications for the Mac and what is more important than the currently existing applications is the number iOS developers who might have be interested in extending their applications to a more universal “Universal binary”.

If you consider the number of iPads Apple is likely to sell this year and add them to the number of Macs that are sold and you see Apple’s participation in the overall computer market rise sharply.   This merger, if it comes to pass, will not mean that OS X is being retired, as some have suggested recently.  It will mean that Apple found an extremely smart way to bring in more users to its platform, regardless of what they are calling it.

The rumor that has come out today is that Apple plans to unify both systems under the iOS name.  In this case we would have three versions of the OS: iOS Desktop, iOS Server and iOS Mobile.  Only time will tell if there is any substance to the rumor and if so, how close we really are to having all this become a reality.