Tim Cook: Future Macs, iPhones And iPads Could All Have The Same Chips Inside [OS X Mountain Lion]

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airipad

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook has shared his thoughts on what Mountain Lion means for the future of the Mac, and has hinted Apple may be considering a grand unification of iOS and OS X somewhere down the line.

In the interview:

“We see that people are in love with a lot of apps and functionality here,” said Mr. Cook, 51 years old, pointing at his iPhone. “Anywhere where that makes sense, we are going to move that over to Mac… We think about everything. We don’t close things off.”

But how far will that go? According to Cook, he envisions Mac laptops continuing to exist alongside the tablet market, but he says that Apple is open to “merging” the two products over time, possibly by adopting the same chips across both laptops and tablets.

“We think about everything,” Cook coyly notes.

At first blush, it would seem as if Apple is saying here that they will move laptops to ARM processors, but according to our research, you’ll probably never own a Mac with an ARM processor. In fact, the opposite could be true within five years, and Apple may very well running Intel inside the iPad.

Asked whether or not Microsoft is still the competition in the desktop space, particularly with Windows 8 coming soon, Cook said that Apple’s only pressure is self-induced, and he doesn’t “really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.” Ouch!

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