A quick public service announcement, inspired by the current level of excitement over the fact that the new AppleTV may be running iOS. Firstly, the differences between iOS and OS X (remember OS X?) are like the differences between Ubuntu and Red Hat. Yes, iOS is the new shiny. And, yes, without iOS I probably wouldn't be able to make a living as an Objective-C programmer. But the differences are pretty superficial and only a little more than skin deep. (Which, by the way, is why I could hit the ground running, while all you ex-C# guys are still trying to get your heads around reference counting and wondering out loud what this delegate shit is about.)
Secondly, you can't wait until people jailbreak the new AppleTV and start writing iOS apps for it? Really? Cocoa Touch is a great library - superior in a number of ways to AppKit, which is starting to look a little long in the tooth - but it was written to fit a very particular use case. I'll give you a hint: the clue's in the name. The AppleTV is running on an A4 because the chip is small, cheap and runs cool. I haven't found the figures yet, but I'm going to bet it only just matches the performance of the Pentium M (also clocked at 1GHz) from the original version. Both generations of machines are running a custom UI built on top of Core Animation. And yet we only get the excitement now. I guess the magic word is 'apps', and the world and his dog seem to think they can download XCode, buy a couple of books and strike it rich. Sigh.
