14 DAY TRIAL // With all the talk about laptops possibly going touch-enabled en masse, especially ultrabooks, people are wondering what this means for tablets.
Apparently, Apple's chief executive officer doesn't think anything will come of laptops equipped with touchscreens or, at least, they won't really take off enough to harm the market share of tablets.
According to him, notebooks with touchscreens would demand too many trade-offs, leading to something that would be neither a nice notebook nor a media slate.
“Anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make trade-offs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day does not please anyone,” Apple CEO said Tim Cook said during the conference call with financial analysts.
“You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. Our view is that the tablet market is huge and we have said that since day one. [...] It was clear to us that there was so much you could do and that the reasons that people would use those would be so broad.”
From what he said, we are guessing he may not have been keeping up with Intel's repeated promises to have $700 / 700 Euro ultrabooks with touch panels by year's end.
We get that trade-offs could be a problem, but we've also witnessed similar conviction when people used to say tablets would never catch on.
Intel and its OEMs have already proven that Ultrabooks can have a decent performance while including a physical keyboard and still having a thickness comparable to that of slates. Price is the only hurdle that still needs to be crossed.
Adding touch on top of that could only lead to a small price premium, not the need to cripple the laptop in some other area. What's more, given Windows 8 and its touch-based UI, adding touch panels on everything makes more sense than some think.
“I believe that there is a very good market for the MacBook Air, and we continue to innovate in that product. [...] You would not want to put [iPad and MB Air] things together because you wind up compromising in both and not pleasing either user. Some people will prefer to own both, and that is great, too. I think to make the compromises of convergence... we are not going to that party. Others might,” Mr. Cook said.
Apple also keeps drawing attention to how slates and PCs/laptops are used for different things, but we can't help but point out, in turn, that this is merely a consequence of their feature sets, not a cause.