Will Apple Ever Merge iPadOS and macOS? John Ternus Responds

Tuesday November 3, 2026 6:21 am PST by Joe Rossignol

Over the years, Apple has repeatedly dismissed the idea of merging iPadOS and macOS into a single operating system. Will that change under John Ternus? On an earnings call yesterday, Apple's new CEO responded to a question about the topic.

In short, the answer remains no.

"We don't have any fundamentally different changes that we're planning right now, nor would we talk about it anyway," said Ternus, in response to an analyst asking about the possibility of a unified Apple operating system.

The full question and answer from Six Colors' transcript of the earnings call:

Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Your latest MacBook Pros included more iOS features like Touch and Dynamic Island as well as, obviously, Siri AI. Should we anticipate further close linking of macOS and iOS features, maybe even pointing at some point to a single unified OS, either for simplicity or to reduce costs?

Ternus: Look, we are very proud of both the Mac and the iPad, and I think what you've seen over the years is we've really enjoyed the ability to bring features and capabilities across the ecosystem and create really compelling features that span things between handoff between iPhone and Mac and iPad, and so when we design the product, we're looking at how can we make the best version of each and every product, and if you look at what we just did last week with the MacBook Pro, we took a huge leap forward. These MacBook Pros are better in every way than the ones that came before them, and we're really proud of that, and so we don't have any fundamentally different changes that we're planning right now, nor would we talk about it anyway.

In a 2025 interview about iPadOS and macOS merging, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi said the company does not want to build "sporks."

"It turns out it's not a good spoon and it's not a good fork," he said.

While it appears that iPadOS and macOS will remain separate operating systems, Macs and iPads have more and more feature overlap over time. For example, the new MacBook Pro models with OLED displays have touchscreen functionality.

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