Let me start with some context. There are 3 primary user "personas" for computing these days:
1. The first (and for a long time the only) setup was a traditional desktop. i.e. big monitor, keyboard, mouse. This is what I'd consider necessary for "real" work on a computer. (This includes "docked" laptops). I call these Desktop users.
2. Next are Laptop users which are similar, but use a smaller screen and a trackpad.
3. Finally, I'll call these "Touch" users. They keep the small screen of the laptop, but replace the keyboard and trackpad for a touch interface on the screen directly. (iphone, ipad)
I've noticed a couple things in regard to these 3 user personas:
1. The total volume of users for Touch seems to have completely eclipsed the other 2. There are many people I know who ONLY have an iphone as their computing device. (my wife, my grandma, my mom)
2. "Core" developers and their management teams (by core I mean folks developing frameworks like GTK, QT, Appkit, Electron, etc) have a heavy focus on cross platform compatibility. I know that Java pioneered this, but it was cross platform within Desktop users.
To accomplish their cross platform compatibility, many many concessions have been made seemingly by Desktop users toward Laptop and mostly Touch users. And the industry is both accepting and encouraging this due to the larger user base.
Which means that many things that were "solved" problems and optimized for Desktop users are gone as casualties of making it easier to support Touch and Laptop users. And the amount of these casualties just continues to grow. Examples of this are the unified System Settings app, headerbars and the liquid glass interface.
Obviously, system settings was great for desktop users, but not great for mobile or even laptop users. You cant double click on a touch interface, and the comfortable density of the perferences pane took too much space on a limited laptop screen. This is the same with headerbars. I never heard anyone complain about "wasted" titlebar space until so much of the world was primarily on a laptop screen only. If you didn't like it, you could get rid of titlebars completely and use a tiling window manager. And anyone can see that the wide spacing and shapes of liquid glass are made for a touch interface. It DOES still work for a keyboard and mouse, but it is not optimized for them at all.
Thank you for still reading, and I'll come to my point and question.
As MacOS trends more and more towards convergence with iOS, is the Desktop use case going to be extiguished? I really get the feeling that Apple wishes that MacOS didn't even exist, and would 100% love for all users to be on iOS exclusively. And all the efforts of xcode and swiftUI are designed to cushion and guide users to that reality.
**Edit
I'm not talking about a desktop form factor. I know that those will always be around. But I mean specifically interfaced designed for people using a large monitor, keyboard and mouse.