Ultrabooks are not desktops
I know it sounds silly when I say it out loud. Of course, you say. Ultrabooks are laptops or as the industry likes to call them "notebook computers". Of course, they are not desktops.
But then, here's the thing. Nobody laughed at Apple when it said maybe, just maybe an iPad is not the same thing as an iPhone. Everybody went like, look how insightful Apple is. Some people even went so far as to say Apple didn't go far enough. The same Apple who removed the floppy disk drive and flash that same pioneering Apple (but I digress).
Nobody bats an eye when Apple says iPad needs a different design in its operating system compared to an iPhone.
But when you read this title, you called me crazy, didn't you? The point is that a laptop is not the same as a desktop computer. Why do they share the same operating system?
The main point of contention is whether you leave a desktop running 24/7. I do. Do you leave your ultrabook running 24/7? Um, no? It isn't meant to take that kind of a beating. It is too slim to handle that much heat dissipation.
What is in an operating system?
What is an operating system really? How is iPad OS different from iOS? iPadOS shares the same code base as iOS but it does some things differently than iOS does. Why? Because they have different use cases.
I don't mind the OS doing stuff in the background while I am not using it on a desktop because I leave it running all the time. So, if I am not actively using it and it isn't doubling as a server, I don't mind if you peg the processor or the disk at 100% while I am not using it.
See this is so much different from an ultrabook. I do not leave an ultrabook running all the time.
Now, all bets are off when it comes to Windows. Windows, as far as it has come, is not even close to being a modern operating system. I only need to ask one question: which components require a restart to update? Currently, it feels like the answer is "all of them". That is not good enough. But then again I digress.
It doesn't matter though because you get the point. If iPadOS needs to be distinct from iOS, I think it makes sense that a notebook OS (at least an ultrabook OS) needs to be different from a desktop OS as well.
tags: ultrabook, operating-systems, computers, iPadOS, desktop, laptop, notebook