Apple has no plans to combine MacBook and iPad: Tim Cook

It has recently emerged that the PC and tablet markets are declining due to massive gain in shipments of smartphones. But Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed there are no plans to combine the MacBook and iPad as both have a "strong future".

In an interview with Independent.ie, Cook says that customers in the market are "not really looking for a converged" MacBook and iPad. "Because what that would wind up doing, or what we're worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You'd begin to compromise in different ways," he said.

Cook had last week said that Apple's newly unveiled iPad Pro works as "a replacement for notebook or a desktop". However, that statement appears to contradict the executive's new statement.

"We don't regard Macs and PCs to be the same," Cook said in the interview. "What we've tried to do is to recognise that people use both iOS and Mac devices." This suggests that Cook's previous claim was in relation to Microsoft's Windows running PCs, not Mac OS X running MacBooks.

According to a recent report by market research firm IDC, the worldwide tablet shipments declined 11.2% to 48.7 million units in the third quarter, with 19.7% year-over-year fall just in iPad shipments. Cook is still "bullish" on getting a positive response from the market with the 12.9in iPad Pro that went on pre-orders last week.

"It's true that the difference between the X86 [PC] and the A-series [Apple iPad architecture] is much less than it's ever been," he said, adding: "That said, what we've tried to do is to recognise that people use both iOS and Mac devices. So we've taken certain features and made them more seamless across the devices."

Apple recently introduced some new multitasking features to give iPad users an improved experience through iOS 9. These features would help the company generate more demand from the market that is already full of Android tablets but is so far dominated by previous iPad models.

Unlike all the other iPad models, the iPad Pro is especially designed to fulfil productivity requirements of iPad users. The Cupertino giant has been offering accessories like the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard to support the new hardware. Moreover, there are components like the 64-bit A9X chip to deliver a faster yet more productive experience than the previous iPads.