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

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

[mattventura]

Well I don't think making the best Mac in the world is very hard for Apple, there isn't exactly a lot of competition there.

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"

[ColdWetDog]

You were staring at it wrong.

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.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

> You must be doing some weird things with your Mac.

Such as using it out of the box?

> Why don't you just disable the gestures you don't like?

I did. I know how to do that, and you know how to do that, but the average user never ever go "WTF? Why did all my windows fly off the screen??"

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

[Grishnakh]

There are lots of things like this, where the UI has slowly regressed and,

It's like this all across the industry: pretty much all UIs have regressed in recent years.

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

[azav]

I develop for Apple for a living, son.

The default blue is eye burning and is everywhere in the Mac OS and iOS.

Nothing's animated? Everything is. Click on a disclosure triangle in the Finder. The entire contents of the folder slide down or slide up. Download a file in Safari. A little cockroach sized badge darts across the screen. Open a panel in Xcode, it slides across the screen instead of opening instantly. Open a new Safari window. It pops open in your face, growing to full size. Send an email in the Mail app. It flies up off the screen. Click in a search bar. The little magnifying glass darts to the left. Click out of it. It darts back to the center. Every alert pops open. Pressing command control D with the mouse over some text results in a VH-1 Pop Up Video style wobbling bubble and then all the content animates in.

Even clicking on a radio button animates the filling in of the button. So much of the UI is now a visual distraction and you can't turn them all off.

I don't know how you don't see this.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even need a modal dialog.

Try opening TextEdit. Now click a browser, and while it's launching, switch back to TextEdit and start typing.

Chances are good that when your browser finishes launching, it will leap to the foreground, interrupting your typing.

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

[graphius]

I agree there are a lot of issues with macs.

The animation, I can live with. I have some desktop effects on my KDE box.

I am not sure where the blue you talk about lives. I guess a lot of icons have some blue in them, but whatever.

I don't like the flat design either, but every OS seems to have jumped on that bandwagon. Buttons should look like buttons, or at least indicate somehow that they are clickable, rather than the hunt and peck guessing game we have now.

I will say though, that OSX is the best OS that runs pro level photography and design programs...

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

[TheRaven64]

This particular point about email actually makes sense. They've decoupled the sending and receiving accounts. You can have multiple of each and you can specify multiple sending addresses associated with a receiving account (not well documented, but a comma-separated list in the email address box) and you can have a preferred SMTP server for each IMAP/POP server, but still fall back to others when that's unavailable. Adding a new SMTP server is easy: Preferences, accounts, Outgoing mail server (SMTP) drop-down, edit server list, and then you're in the interface for creating new ones.

What it does reliable when you open the Mac Book and more or less in +/- one second remove the power cord: crash. Always.

That sounds like you may have a hardware defect. I've done that a few times by accident recently and not had a problem.

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:Odd choice

[MMC Monster]

[...](for standard light Office apps, some games and some more demading programs)

I think you proved their point for them. If it can't do everything a desktop can do, people are going to need the desktop.

On the other hand, if it is a really good tablet and can hand off apps to the desktop Mac (it's baked into the current iOS/OS X versions), that's considered a good deal in the Apple books. Maximal functionality with minimal compromise.

Re:Odd choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the track record at Apple, it means they are working feverishly on an iBook or MacPadPro device similar to the Surface Book. It is approximately 3 years from introduction based on previous product denials and subsequent releases. I cite the iPad Mini and iPad Pro as examples of this trend.

Apple literally does this with most of it's new products which are simply imitations and following the leaders in a segment. They decry the necessity and utility until they can bring their own product to market. "You'd have to sand down your fingers" and such stupidity.

Re:Odd choice

[thegarbz]

The "surface" model was likely chosen by Microsoft as an actually open area in tech, one where their competitors couldn't show up nearly instantly, including Apple.

There were many "Surface" devices on the market. They are just a natural progression of tablet model from 2003ish where laptops came with displays that could fold back on themselves, and I've used many such devices over the past 12 years. There is only a few key things that Microsoft did to try and win with the surface:
- Use today's tech. A tablet needed to be light and needed a capacitive touchscreen.
- Go all out. When the Surface was released it was competing against small light laptops and cheap crap "transformers". The Surface was the first transformer with real balls.
- Palm detection (see capacitive touchscreen / today's tech).
- Attempt to make the OS tablet friendly.

I remember Windows 7 when it first came out using a Panasonic "tablet" laptop thing. The handwriting recognition was awful, windows were impossible to resize as you needed to hit the border exactly, and the device was genuinely unusable for many tasks.

They didn't enter a new market, but they are the first to enter it with an all-or-nothing strategy given that the Surface is their only device.

Re:Odd choice

[sexconker]

Don't forget the larger iPhones.
Apple's "we will never" means "we're working on it but it's not ready".

Re:Odd choice

[chmod a x mojo]

If it can't do everything a desktop can do, people are going to need the desktop.

Neither can my Macbook Pro ( or Windows / Linux laptops ) since laptop GFX cards suck compared to Desktop GFX cards. Should I throw out all of my laptops since obviously a desktop is better?

Guess what I usually use my laptops for.... Office apps, some games, and some more demanding programs like Lightroom / PS.
  A surface Pro would work just as well as any of the laptops I use on the go, better in some cases because of the digitizer and pen.

Re:Odd choice

[exomondo]

Don't forget the larger iPhones.

Or the stylus.

And Apple is wrong

[vux984]

The three phases of Apple:

1 - Tell us we don't want something at all.
2 - Watch everyone ignore you and build versions of it anyway.
3- Show up late to the party with an Apple version and say you invented it; rake in the money.

We're moving from stage 1 to stage 2 now.

So translation: Apple is working on it, but its not ready yet.

Re:Tim Cook doesn't know why anyone would buy a PC

[UnknowingFool]

PCs were the only solution to certain problems for a long time: How do you interact with a website? How do you answer email? etc. As tablets are filling that need for more and more of the average consumer, PC sales are dying. The average Joe never "needed" a PC really. The PC was just the only choice he/she really had before smartphones and tablets. For some consumers, yes, they'll need documents, spreadsheets, and gaming so there will always be some PC sales.

And 3.5" is the perfect phone size

[danbob999]

We will never make a larger phone.

Re:I suspect it already does

[UnknowingFool]

I see the main thing Apple would have to solve if they were to ever create a hybrid is a better UI. Touch works well for tablets but not so much for computers. Keyboard and mouse work well for computers but not tablets. For now MS didn't really solve the problem other than offering both on the Surface; however, the forcing of users to use more touch in Windows 8 has led to a backlash.

Re:I suspect it already does

[monkeyxpress]

There has also been a lot of convergence in OSX/iOS development tools over the last few xcode releases. AppKit has UiKit style autolayout now and many of the back end services and apis are being normalised.

The Apple Pencil makes a mouse oriented UI usable on an iPad like device, and I wouldn't be surprised if by the iPad Pro 2 it is reasonably trivial to make an OSX app that builds for iPad Pro with minimal UI tweaks.

Re:Tim Cook doesn't know why anyone would buy a PC

[macs4all]

As tablets are filling that need for more and more of the average consumer, PC sales are dying.

Maybe for the rest of the industry; but not for Apple.

Re:xCode?

[fluffernutter]

"It would be nice to be able to create programs on the iPad Pro". How many good durable mechanical switch keyboards work with a tablet? Programming on OS/X is frustrating enough for me, never mind being relegated to a touch screen.

Money

[Luthair]

From Apple's perspective why sell one device when you can sell two.

Re:Money

[Luthair]

Who said I'm a believer in Microsoft?

And lets be honest, for the past 10-years Apple's 'innovation' consists of recycling the ipod touch (hmm, add cellular, remove cellular but increase screen size).

Not One UI To Rule Them All

[danaris]

It's fairly well known that the cores of iOS and OS X (no slash, please! :-) ) are the same. That's not really the issue here—it's the problems with the differences between the optimal UI for a keyboard-and-mouse-based (or whatever pointing device you prefer) interface and the optimal UI for a touch-based interface.

But while I agree that it would be foolish to try to make a hybridized OS, I could see there being a device that works both ways, a few years from now, by being an iOS device when it's on its own, but when plugged into a special dock, it would become, essentially, the CPU for a monitor, keyboard, and mouse/trackpad/whatever that you have plugged into said dock...and the OS that displayed on that monitor would be OS X, not iOS.

Then you'd easily be able to access all the same documents, media, bookmarks, etc without even needing to sync them through iCloud, because they'd all literally be right on the device.

Now, I don't insist on this prediction by any means. I do think it would be a believable way to do some kind of convergence without the (IMNSHO) ugly compromises required of a convertible device like the Surface, though, and rather cool to boot.

Dan Aris

Re:Tim Cook doesn't know why anyone would buy a PC

[gstoddart]

Or, because he believes there will always be separate markets for Macs and portable devices, that they're not the same thing, and creating one combined device would probably result in a device which sucked as a PC and as a mobile device. I'm inclined to agree.

I don't want my tablet or my phone to be running the same OS I'd run on my desktop or my laptop. They're different things, used differently, and don't even run the same programs.

I keep looking at Microsoft trying to make all of the devices converge as full-spec x86 devices as lazy and self-serving because they don't have the ability to come up with a mobile OS which isn't just the same under the covers. It screams "we have no idea how to make a new mobile operating system, so instead we'll stick with the same architecture we've had for 20 years and do nothing".

You don't need to think laptops and desktops are a dying technology. You just don't have to think that converging them to a single device actually results in a good product.

Microsoft just wants to put out the exact same thing they already have and call it mobile. Not everyone agrees. In fact, we think it's just lazy, and pushing out a product and calling it "innovating", and will result in a product which sucks at both tasks. Increasingly, Microsoft looks like the old tech company who can't see past the world being about Office and Outlook -- which means they seem to be missing the point about what people actually want.

I agree with Tim Cook, that's just a product which will suck as a desktop/laptop, and also suck as a mobile device.

For the things most people are using their tablets for, there is no benefit in having it be an x86 platform. And from what I've seen of the new Microsoft interface, it's so horribly skewed towards being a bad interface for tablets ... it's an utterly useless interface for desktops.

They should be separate operating systems because they're different devices, and used differently.

Once again, those "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" ads showing Microsoft stuck in the past and missing the point seem like sheer brilliance. Because slavishly trying to keep to x86 on the thinking it's better than solving the actual problem is just inertia and not wanting things to change.

No Xcode for iPad

[tepples]

There has also been a lot of convergence in OSX/iOS development tools over the last few xcode releases.

I'll believe the convergence once Xcode runs on iPad Pro. In theory, I could run Visual Studio, MonoDevelop, Code::Blocks, or any other IDE for Windows on a Surface Pro or Surface Book. Even Android has AIDE, an app for apping apps.

Apps!

Re:Or Will They?

[Penguinisto]

Or will they, in two years form now?

Why bother? If you want one bad enough, you can go buy one right now.

Re:I suspect it already does

[fluffernutter]

My impression is that Apple wants the mouse and all other pointing functions to go away. They have created all kinds of ridiculous swipes on the touchpad that completely breaks my typing flow, while making things impossible to do with hotkeys.

Re:Tim Cook doesn't know why anyone would buy a PC

[Richard_at_work]

I take it you missed the entire Tim Cook comment of "Why would you buy a PC?" at the iPad Pro retail launch? Tim Cook doesn't think you should buy a PC when instead you could buy an iPad Pro.

So I'm not "nuts" at all, I'm simply taking on board what Tim Cook has actually said.

And I disagree with you on both the Surface Pro and Surface Book, as I own both and love both - but what that really means is any device I pick up at home, I can open a code editor on and hack away. Which I cannot do on the iPad Pro. I can also resort to full tablet mode with no issues. Which I cannot do on a Macbook, Macbook Air or Macbook Pro.

People keep saying that the Surface Pro and Books are compromises - I haven't yet run into a compromise on either.

Don't get me wrong - some people don't need the level of content creation that a full PC or Mac will give you, and in those circumstances a dedicated tablet will work fine for those people. But for me, the compromise is the hard delineation between a dedicated tablet OS and application set and a dedicated desktop OS and application set - I want both available to me on the one device.

Re:And what for CS homework?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the reason why I did not buy my daughter a microwave.

Re:I suspect it already does

[ColdWetDog]

The real killer for productivity in iOS is the lack of user space accessible file system. Either they have to open the up to iOS users - and take the security hit, or they have to hide it from OS X users (over our dead 17 inch laptops).

Re:This seems familiar

[macs4all]

Cook sounds very Blackberrian with this. If he thinks they can fight the entire industry movement, good luck.

Funny. Apple's PC sales are UP year-over-year, while the "entire (rest) of the industry" sales are down.

I think the "entire (rest) of the industry" needs to stop being such lemmings. It seems like Apple is the only company who has actually analyzed what the market wants. The rest are just trying to "out innovate" Apple. They couldn't come up with one single tablet that would unseat the iPad; so they said "I know, let's listen to what the Microsoft Rep that came in last quarter said about "The future of computing" " and build something based on MS' Reference Design."

What else explains something like half a dozen mfgs coming out with virtually the same device within the same 6 months?

Meanwhile, Apple chugs along, chuckling to itself, knowing that it had already experimented internally with exactly that type of device five years ago, and found out that none of their alpha-testers liked it.

Re:"I left my Ethernet dongle at home."

[tepples]

To clarify: I have nothing against dongles in principle. All I'm really trying to say is that the dongle has to be included in the total cost of ownership.

Everything in post #50941423 after "science" was uncalled for.

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:I suspect it already does

[fluffernutter]

The problem is, there is a great mass of people that don't use a computer for serious things so they will be supportive of devices that aren't for serious things. This will make the cost of serious devices go up.

the actual quote

[slashmydots]

"We feel strongly that nobody will sell us an efficient x86 CPU because we're such unfair, lying, backstabbing assholes to our hardware vendors."

Re:I suspect it already does

[im_thatoneguy]

Windows 8 and 10 have a user accessible file system without compromising security. It's kind of a PITA in some situations because the user has to elevate each folder's access privileges per application and some some folders like like Win32 Program Files and the System directory are off-limits (except through UNC hacks).

Forces developers to rethink a lot of stuff too since file access isn't guaranteed.