Tim Cook: Apple Won't Create 'Converged' MacBook and iPad (independent.ie)

LichtSpektren writes: In an interview with Independent.ie, Apple CEO Tim Cook has stated that Apple is currently not looking to create an iPad that runs Mac OS X. "We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad, because what that would wind up doing, or what we're worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You'd begin to compromise in different ways." Cook also commented that he does not travel with a Mac anymore, only his iPad Pro and iPhone.

Comments

Odd choice

[tomknight]

As a (surprisedly) happy Surface user, it seems strange that Apple aren't trying to regain initiative here. The Surface is really a good beast, it works well as a tablet and a desktop replacement (for standard light Office apps, some games and some more demading programs). It gives me a good touch keyboard for sshing into my systems, and has a USB interface for storage, keyboard, mouse. These are all things that the iPad failed to do.

Re:"We want to make the best Mac in the world"

[Anonymous Coward]

What's amusing to me is, in the '80s and '90s, people raved about the Mac user experience and begged for a more stable & modern OS under the hood.

Now, Apple has a stable and mature OS under the hood and they've thrown out user experience. All that clutter, easy-to-mistrigger interface gestures and confusing features like file versioning. Still no easy way to manage groups, security and keychains.

The first day I started using Mac OS X and a program popped to the foreground while I was typing (my eyes off the screen), interrupting my workflow, I knew that Apple had lost their way.

Re:"We want to make the best Mac in the world"

[azav]

It's been straight downhill with regards to usability for every release after 10.6.8.

Too much animation that you can't turn off.

Terrible colors (glaring painful blue against all white).

This terrible "flat" design means you can't tell what a button is.

Removal of button backgrounds from buttons also means that you can't tell what a button is.

Did I mention too much useless animation that you can't turn off? Because there's too much distracting and useless animation that you can't turn off.

Apple needs to get back to their basics.

Awesome, now stop the War on Ports

[exabrial]

Just bought a MacBook, because OSX is the ultimate Unix development platform. But I also had to buy a Gig-E dongle, and if you buy a MacBook Air, you have to buy a USB-C dongle, and an Ethernet Dongle, and none of your thunderbolt accessories work anymore.

The dudes at the Apple store say, "everything will be wireless eventually" well that's a great theory, but 1) It's not wireless right now 2) Even if it were, in a high density office environment, there is simply not enough wireless spectrum allocated in the USA for 200 users in a 35,000 ft^2 space to have a Gig-E wireless connection.

So stop the stupidity. Gig-E ports should be standard on your "Pro" models. Consumer or Home models, I understand the philosophy, but not on the Pro.

Re:"We want to make the best Mac in the world"

[TheRaven64]

The gestures aren't too bad - you can turn them off. Since the introduction of OS X, there's been some crap that's only for in-store demos and you want to turn off to get real work done. The real issues are more subtle, such as around 10.7 they removed the much-bigger shadow on the foreground window because it 'looked ugly' and then removed most of the other visual clues that a window is foreground, measurably increasing the likelihood of users thinking that the wrong window is foreground. There are lots of things like this, where the UI has slowly regressed and, if anyone bothers to run user studies, they can clearly measure the regressions. Unfortunately, they've also improved a load of things and so there's no simple ordering of OS X versions by usability: each one introduces improvements and regressions.