Phil Schiller Interview With The Independent on the New MacBook Pros

Terrific interview by David Phelan.

Q: The evolution of the Touch Bar — how did it come about?

A: It’s part of our thinking about where to take the notebook next. Others are trying to turn the notebook into the tablet. The new MacBook Pro is a product that celebrates that it is a notebook, this shape that has been with us for the last 25 years is probably going to be with us for another 25 years because there’s something eternal about the basic notebook form factor.

You have a surface that you type down on with your hands, with a screen facing you vertically. That basic orientation, that L shape makes perfect sense and won’t go away. The team came up with this idea that you can create a multi-touch surface that’s coplanar with the keyboard and the trackpad but brings a whole new experience into it, one that’s more interactive, with multi-touch.

Q: Will macOS and iOS (the operating systems for Macs and iPhones) always be different?

A: We’re steadfast in our belief that there are fundamentally two different products to make for customers and they’re both important. There’s iPhone and iPad which are single pieces of glass, they’re direct-manipulation, multi-touch and tend towards full-screen applications. And that’s that experience. And we want to make those the best in that direction anyone can imagine. We have a long road ahead of us on that.

Then there’s the Mac experience, dominated by our notebooks and that’s about indirect manipulation and cursors and menus. We want to make this the best experience we can dream of in this direction.

I know a lot of people — DF readers, developer friends — who are deeply worried that Apple is sunsetting the Mac. And it is a fact that the Mac Pro hasn’t seen an update in over 1,000 days — Apple deserves scathing criticism for that.

But I would hold up as proof of Apple’s commitment to the Mac two things: the annual update cycle of the OS and the MacBook lineup. (Personally, I would prefer if they slowed down on major updates to MacOS and updated hardware more frequently with minor speed bumps.)

I truly believe that what Schiller says above is the honest truth: iOS and MacOS are not converging, and neither are the hardware form factors.

★ Wednesday, 2 November 2016