Even before Apple unveiled the 12-inch MacBook Retina laptop and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, I wondered whether at any time in the future I would end up finding it difficult to choose between these two devices as my next primary computer. And the truth is I haven’t been able to answer that question now that both gadgets are official. It all has to do with the software they’re shipping with, and Apple has just confirmed may never release the device of my dreams.
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Ideally, I’d like to use OS X features for work and iOS for everything else. But Apple won’t merge its Mac and iPad software, a policy it had for years, and one that Apple’s Tim Cook is still faithful to.
The exec told Box’s Aaron Levie that merging OS X and iOS would basically result in a poorer experience, Re/code reports. Unifying the two operating systems would “subtract from both,” and the user wouldn’t “get the best experience from either.”
Cook did say that Apple wants to make it easy to move from one device to another, which isn’t terribly surprising. Unifying OS X and iOS is something Apple has been working on for years with help of some common apps, iCloud, and letting users move certain tasks and apps back and forth between platforms with Handoff. But that means users still have to buy two separate devices, a Mac and an iPad – something that certainly helps Apple with its quarterly bottom line – rather than an all-in-one Surface Pro-like device capable of offering users the best from both worlds.
That said, Apple in the past has said “No” to many things, including netbook-sized laptops, big-screen smartphones and tablets with a stylus. Maybe when the time is right and Apple finds a way to do it that it’ll be happy with, a Surface Pro-like Mac or iPad will magically appear.
