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"

[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.

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

[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

[sexconker]

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

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.

And 3.5" is the perfect phone size

[danbob999]

We will never make a larger phone.

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.

Money

[Luthair]

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

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: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: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.

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.

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."