I'm curious why people as so quick to discount iOS and Android as "Not proper operating systems"... It has the feel of someone in the early 80's discounting microcomputers as not real computers...
The truth is, most people use their tablet/iPad/smart phone for almost all day to day computing tasks. The desktop is becoming as much a relic as mainframes and minicomputers have now become.
Of course they're proper operating systems. People who want to defend Windows like to say this, because that makes them feel better... I guess. After all, it's Microsoft themselves that kind of begged the question, with Windows 8. They thrust this WinRT/Metro tablet OS in every desktop user's face, and said "this is the future". They even started calling that subsystem "Modern" and the old, desktop-class Windows "classic" or "legacy".
Truth is, all of Windows is getting their ass kicked by Android. Yes, that's in units, not money. But the real strength of an OS is only one thing: the applications. We Amiga users ought to grok that... doesn't matter if your OS is better, only what you can actually do with it on a practical basis. When you look at those numbers, it's easy to imagine that the mainstream of software support will move away from Windows.
And that's a big problem for Microsoft, because "we are the default, we have the applications" is all that Microsoft has ever had in their favor. They started with absolutely horrible operating system technology. The NT kernel was good, but never any better than the various UNIX-derivatives. Their APIs have been largely sub-standard.. early Windows designers set out not to build the best graphical OS, but the hardest to translate to more rationally designed operating systems (which would include Linux, AmigaOS, MacOS, BeOS, most others). And Microsoft have been arrogant jerks in the way they've supported the end user. In short, a huge number of users are on Windows because they have to be. If they had another viable option -- and that means full support from applications -- more would move than would stick with Windows.
And of course, both Android and iOS are "real" operating systems. After all, Android IS real Linux. It doesn't come with all the stuff you'd want in desktop Linux, but it's the same underlying OS that powers embedded devices, media players, most every network router or switch, most servers, and most supercomputers. The Android UI started out optimized for phones. It took them two years to optimize it for tablets... even though companies started selling Android tablets a year before that. Now they're selling Android desktops. There is absolutely no reason Android can't move to the desktop.. but it will take Google's interest in doing that to make it any good.
And that's kind of inevitable. Last year, not quite 3x as many Android copies as Windows made it into some kind of personal computer. Next year, it'll be over 4x. That means that, pretty much already, there are mobile Android users who see their device as their primary computing platform, and either don't use Windows (or other desktop OSs) regularly, don't use them at all, or at least not for their personal computing. These people will get much more out of an Android desktop than a Windows desktop. And there will be more of those people every year.. that's just what the numbers tell us.
These numbers also suggest that if Apple could bridge MacOS and iOS in some way, making it more of a situational thing than an OS thing, the desktop-vs-mobile question, they could be just as powerful as Microsoft, at least numbers-wise. And if they respect the desktop model, rather than ignoring it as Microsoft did, they'll get desktop converts, not simply "iPhone coattails" buyers of the desktop systems. MacOS and iOS are, of course, both built on "DarwinOS", which is just the BSD UNIX bit mixed up with CMU's Mach kernel (plus decades of Apple tweaks) and NeXTStep. This may not be on supercomputers, but it's just as much a desktop-level OS as Windows.
While I don't know about iOS, Android actually supports desktop things now. The presentation is based on your Home Shell (GUI Shell), so it's already possible to run multiple applications at once (the thing end-users think of as multitasking), panelized, on any Android device. The apps themselves not only support resizing, but any application that doesn't internally support resizing has that managed by Android. So it's not hard to image a future desktop Home Shell for Android that supports multiple apps in overlapping windows.. every application already could support that.
Also consider that today's mobile devices are more powerful than PCs from ten years ago. You have quad-core processors at 2.5GHz, 3GB RAM, 128GB storage (with expansion), 802.11n networking, etc. The mobile device form factor is entirely optimized for mobile, of course.. that makes sense. The whole idea of a touch interface is a compromise for mobility... it's good when you have a pocket computer, but it's a terribly stupid idea for the desktop, which permits much more accurate and fast things like mice and Wacoms. No one should be suggesting that today's 10" tablets are going to replace a hex-core i7 desktop with 64GB RAM, many TBs of storage, and multiple qHD monitors (eg, something like what I'm tying this on). But the level of performance in a tablet of today, repackaged for the desktop, is plenty of performance for most PC users.
