Rumour mills have ever since been churning out the fact, that the iPad and Macbook lines would come together in the near future to form a hybrid device that could give you the best of both worlds. While the concept seems quite exciting, Apple believes otherwise.
CEO Tim Cook, on Sunday, denied all these speculations saying that convergence between the two device line-ups would mean inherent compromises.
We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad,
Cook told Independent.ie in a recent interview.
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.
The rumour about Apple converging its two lines of portable computing devices isn’t old. It has been thoroughly studied by analysts over the years, and blown up to the size of hot air balloons by speculators. The rumours started becoming more and more believable as Apple updated its ARM-based A-series chip with the latest A9 series, which stood as legitimate competition to desktop-class CPUs built by Intel.
It’s true that the difference between the X86 and the A-series is much less than it’s ever been.
Cook added.
That said, what we’ve tried to do is to recognize that people use both iOS and Mac devices. So we’ve taken certain features and made them more seamless across the devices. So with things like Handoff we just made it really simple to work on one of our products and pick it up and work on the next product.
Based on Cook’s comment, we can be sure not to expect a traditional laptop type system based on the A-series ported directly from the iPad in the near future. Another observation, though, is that the company hasn’t completely ruled out the possibility of an A-series MacBook. So only time will tell what the tech giant has in mind.
