Apple CEO Tim Cook has come out with some rather controversial statements against Android and Windows 8, that may likely be talked about for the next few months.
Cook made the statements during Apple’s first quarter earnings report. The statements he made hints that Apple does not have any plans of merging the iPad with the Mac. PC Mag has released the full transcript of Cook’s statement.
“Anything can be forced to converge,” Cook said. “But the problem is that the products are about tradeoffs, you begin to make tradeoffs to the point that what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone.
“You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. So our view is that the tablet market is huge; we’ve said that since day one, we didn’t wait until we had a lot of results. We were using them here, and it was already clear to us that there was so much you could do, and the reasons that people would use those would be so broad, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen. The iPad has taken off in not only consumer in a meaningful way, but in consumer, in education, enterprise, and its sort of everywhere you look now. And the applications are so easy to make very meaningful for someone, and there’s such an abundance of those, that as the ecosystem gets better and better, and as we continue to double down on making great product, I think that the limit here is nowhere in sight.”
“Now – through last quarter, I should say, which is just two years after we shipped the initial iPad – we shipped 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs. And five years for that many iPods. And over three years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. So I think iPad – it’s a profound product, the breadth of it is incredible, and the appeal of it is universal. So I could not be happier with being in the market, and the level of which we’re innovating with the ecosystem and the marker here is incredible.”
“Now in terms of the market itself, IDC and Gartner and Forrester had some numbers out there, and Gartner is saying there’s 3.25 out there by 2015, Forrester is three seventy-five, basically they’re in the mid-three hundreds, about where the PC market is today. And 2015 is only three years from now. So I think that even the you know more formal predicters outside of us are beginning to see these lines cross. So I strongly believe that they will.”
“Now having said that, I also believe that there is a very good market for the MacBook Air,” Cook concluded. “And we continue to innovate in that product. But I do think that it appeals to someone who has a little bit different requirements. And you wouldn’t want to put these things together because you wind up compromising both and not pleasing the user. Some people will prefer to own both, and that’s great there. But I think to make the compromises of convergence, we’re not going to that party. Others might. Others might from a defensive point of view, particularly. We’re going to play in both.”
Cook’s statements are obviously aimed at both Windows 8, which is Microsoft’s new OS built for both desktops and tablets, and hybrid devices like the Asus Transformer Prime – a device that is both a tablet and a PC and runs on the Android mobile operating system. Cook’s statements should be taken with a grain of salt. He was a protégé of Jobs, who is the master at creating these kinds of sensational statements that serve as marketing propaganda. Even the implication that Apple will not merge the iPad and the Mac should not be taken too seriously. Every new update to the Mac OSX makes it look more and more like the iOS, which is quite interesting. If we’re going to look at what Apple is doing versus what Cook just said, it’s more likely that some kind of convergence between OSX and iOS will happen in the future. It will be interesting to know what Cook has up his sleeve and whether these statements are just smoke and mirrors to hide what Apple really plans in the future.
One thought on “Tim Cook Makes Controversial Statements Vs Windows 8, Android”
I think the fact that Mac OS X and iOS becoming more and more similar has nothing to do with merging Macs and iOS devices, it’s just about aiming more potential converts who are already iOS users but not yet into Macs. Perhaps with Mountain Lion, Apple could be able to say ‘if you can use an iPad, you can use a Mac’.