Apple is not giving up on the desktop

Nicole Kobie December 20, 2016

Tim Cook has promised his employees that Apple hasn’t given up on the desktop. The Apple CEO has defended the slower update cycle for desktop versions of the Mac, after the company failed to refresh its desktop lineup this year. The iMac was updated a year ago, while the Mac mini and Mac Pro haven’t been refreshed for more than two years.

That’s led to some speculation that the iMac and Mac Pro desktops were on the way out in order to focus on portable successes such as the iPad.

Such chatter must have been kicking off around the water coolers in Cupertino, as Cook was spurred to respond on a message board for employees, at the same time as he explained his reasons for meeting president-elect Donald Trump.

“Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote on the in-house message board, according to a TechCrunch report. “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.” Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display

He goes on to stress that desktops remain “really important” to users. “The desktop is very strategic for us,” he said. “It’s unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop – the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.”

Cook also added Apple has a clear idea of what’s coming next in the market, but realises there’s value in exploring new ideas to see where they go – praising Apple employees for being willing to take that journey.

“The fantastic thing about Apple employees is they get excited about something, and they want to know how it works. What it will do. What its capabilities are,” he wrote. “If they want to know about something in an entirely different industry, they start pulling the string and see where it takes them. They’re focused more on the journey, which enables so many great things to happen.”

He added: “We’ve got a ton of things on our roadmap that I can’t talk about, but that I’m incredibly excited about, that are the result of pulling that string and not being bound by the box that so many people in life get bound by.”