“We don’t believe in sort of watering down one for the other,” Cook said. “Both [The Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two … you begin to make trade offs and compromises.” He went on: “So this merger thing that some folks are fixated on, I don’t think that’s what users want.” If this line of thinking sounds familiar, it was in 2012 that Cook likened 2-in-1 devices to combining two random appliances. “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know those things are not going to be probably be pleasing to the user,” said Cook during an earnings call. In December, a Bloomberg report suggested Apple is working on a project internally called Marzipan, which would unify the macOS and iOS codebase to run iOS apps on Mac laptops and desktops. That would stop short of a merger that runs both on Macs and iPads. Additionally, a more recent report suggests that Apple may be moving away from Intel’s chips, and an Apple-created CPU might be engineered to run both types of software after all. But for now, you won’t see macOS on an iPad or iOS on a Mac, but the software itself may be what makes the move between platforms.

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