Recently Apple’s Tim Cook said that they will never produce a convergent Tablet Mac. In other words they have no interest in making a touchscreen Mac with an optional iOS front end in a vein similar to what Microsoft has done with Windows. This is a bit disappointing in my view but Apple has back tracked on these kinds of statements before. Steve Jobs even once said that they’d never produce a 7-inch iPad and eventually the iPad Mini was introduced.
So what other kinds of machines will Apple never produce?
1. A Touchscreen iMac: There’s a local computer store near where I live that also sells Macs and when I walk past the Mac section you can clearly see that iMacs are covered in fingerprints. People mistakenly think that Apple’s large iMac displays have touch capability, which proves there is a user demand and expectation for them, even if Apple don’t agree.
2. An upgradable tower-based Mac: A standard run of the mill, mid-level desktop computer running OS X is only possible if you build a hackintosh. The closest fully upgradable desktop available is the Mac Pro, which is well beyond the budgets of the average consumer. A Mac tower priced at $500 – $1500 would sell extremely well but would likely not offer Apple the same level of profit margin it enjoys from its current Macs.
3: An Apple gaming console: It’s probably too late for Apple to introduce a console to compete with the Xbox and PS4, especially when it would probably be based on the Mac. The Mac is simply not a good gaming platform, however Apple has tried with their own gaming device in the past. In 1995 they released the Apple Pippin. It’s more likely that Apple’s new Apple TV will form the basis of Apple’s assault on the gaming and living room market. That device is capable of playing the enormity of iOS games from the App Store and it may begin to make an impression in the console market, but first and foremost it’s a television set top box.
4: An upgradable laptop: The ability for the user to upgrade the RAM and the hard drive on a Mac notebook is something that ended with the introduction of the MacBook Air and has now spread to the MacBook Pro and even the Mac Mini. The Ultrabook craze has made notebook computers more disposal than ever. These devices are built to be replaced all too quickly because they can’t be modified, thus accelerating planned obsolescence.
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