No, the Mac and iPad will not merge, nor will there be touchscreen Macs
MacDailyNews Webmaster
Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro is the world’s best pro notebook.
Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller spoke with CNET about the concepts of a merged Mac and iPad and touchscreen Macs:
iPad was created, as you may remember when Steve [Jobs] announced it just about a decade ago now, to be a new-category product between your iPhone and your Mac, and something that had to create its own reason to exist to fill a need in your life…
[CNET] You don’t envision a future where they merge?
[Schiller] No, that’s not our view. Because then you get this in-between thing, and in-between things are never as good as the individual things themselves. We believe the best personal computer is a Mac, and we want to keep going down that path. And we think the best tablet computing device is an iPad, and we’ll go down that path.
Apple’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro is the world’s best pro tablet.
iPad benefits because we assume that you need to be able to do most everything with touch, and we don’t have to trade off on that experience. Mac assumes you want to do most everything with a keyboard and mouse input. We don’t have to trade off on that path. You can look at some of the other products that will try to go halfway between the two. They end up just compromising experiences. That’s not good.
[CNET] What about adding a touchscreen to a Mac? In your mind, would that be a compromise?
[Schiller] That engineering effort is better spent on making the Mac be the best keyboard-trackpad experience possible. That’s what our customers want us to spend our time on.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple is approaching this correctly — as opposed to Microsoft’s Surface toaster-fridge — exactly as we suspected Apple would many years ago:
To us longtime Apple watchers, Cupertino seems to be saying, “Multi-Touch on the screen only when trackpads are not part of the device.” – MacDailyNews, November 19, 2008
Does it make more sense to be smearing your fingers around on your notebook’s screen or on a spacious trackpad (built-in or on your desk) that’s designed specifically and solely to be touched? Apple thinks things through much more than do other companies. The iPhone’s and iPad’s screens have to be touched; that’s all they has available. A MacBook’s screen doesn’t not have to be touched in order to offer Multi-Touch. There is a better way: Apple’s way. And, no Gorilla Arm, either.
The only computers using Multi-Touch properly, using device-appropriate Multi-Touch input areas are Macintosh personal computers from Apple that run OS X (and Linux and can even slum it with Windows, if need be) and iOS even more personal computers (EMPCs), namely: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and iPad mini. — MacDailyNews, May 4, 2013
Think code convergence (more so than today) with UI modifications per device. A unified underlying codebase for Intel, Apple A-series, and, in Apple’s labs, likely other chips, too (just in case). This would allow for a single App Store for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users that features a mix of apps: Some that are touch-only, some that are Mac-only, and some that are universal (can run on both traditional notebooks and desktops as well as on multi-touch computers like iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and – pretty please, Apple – Apple TV). Don’t be surprised to see Apple A-series-powered Macs, either. — MacDailyNews Take, January 9, 2014
