64-bit App Store requirement

[Richard Gaskin]

Trevor DeVore wrote:

 > I was thinking the requirement was going to be for the MAS.

You may just be ahead of your time.

After all, it seem unlikely Apple will be shipping an iOS device that 
has more than 4 GB RAM, and even if they did, with PAE it would only be 
logically "necessary" if they expected individual apps to need more than 
4 GB.

True, it's more efficient to use native addressing, and having committed 
to 64-bit gates it'll certainly help - but only very modestly, unlikely 
significant enough to end-users to make it a requirement.

So what could be driving this?

When we look at the big picture we see heavy investments in LLVM/Clang, 
Swift, 64-bit uniformity, and other things that seem almost random when 
viewed individually.

And all this is taking place in a business environment in which device 
types continue to both diversify and overlap in applicable use cases.

It simply doesn't make economic sense to continue down the road of 
making a different OS for every device type forever.

With a flexible, reconfigurable kernel, one could craft an OS that's 
scalable and adaptable for all device types.

I'll go out on a limb to put a date on it:  I believe the big 
announcement at WWDC 2016 will be the end of both iOS and OS X, and the 
start of a new OS to replace them both.

So right now they're quietly laying the ground work....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com