Apple chief executive Tim Cook said Tuesday that Apple would manufacture both MacBooks and iPads for some time to come, suggesting that the two products should not be brought together.
"You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know those things are not going to be probably be pleasing to the user," Cook told analysts during a Tuesday earnings call.
Cook made his statements during Tuesday's first-quarter earnings call, when Apple reported profits that nearly doubled from a year ago, prompted by the launch of the iPhone 4S in China and strong sales of its iPad tablet and the Macintosh.
Later this year, Microsoft will release Windows 8. The new operating system will straddle tablets as well as more traditional netbooks, enabling a new generation of convertible tablets pioneered by the Lenovo IdeaPad and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime. But in response to an analyst question, Cook said that there was no reason to believe that Apple would one day unveil a cross between a Mac and an iPad, the approach that the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime took, as a challenge to the iPad. The tradeoffs, he suggested, would not please customers. As it was, he said, Apple sold all the new iPads it could make, and remains supply constrained.
Below is a transcript of Cook's statements.
"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."
For more from Mark, follow him on Twitter @MarkHachman.
