Apple Executives Discuss The Mac’s 30th Anniversary

In a rare interview, key Apple executives sat down with Macworld to discuss Friday’s 30th anniversary of the Macintosh and more about the future of the company. While the iconic “1984” Super Bowl ad first teased the computer on Jan. 22, 1984, Steve Jobs officially unveiled the device at a meeting two days later:

“Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they’re all gone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, in an interview on Apple's Cupertino campus Thursday. “We’re the only one left. We’re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.”

Along with Schiller, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi and Vice President of Software Technology Bud Tribble talked to Jason Snell. And all three said the Mac has a long life ahead of it, thanks in part to the iPhone and iPad:

“The thing that has turbocharged the Mac has been the advent of the iPhone and the iPad,” Tribble said. According to Tribble, having Apple’s hardware and software teams work on the company’s new mobile products has dramatically reinvigorated Mac development. “That cross-pollination of ideas, the fact that the [Mac and iOS] teams are the same team, has propelled the Mac further than I had hoped for.”

While speculation swirls that the rumored "iPad Pro" could be a hybrid device with OS X and iOS elements, Federighi said convergence of the operating systems is not in Apple’s future:

We don’t waste time thinking, ‘But it should be one [interface!]’ How do you make these [operating systems] merge together?’ What a waste of energy that would be,” Schiller said. But he added that the company definitely tries to smooth out bumps in the road that make it difficult for its customers to switch between a Mac and an iOS device. For example, making sure its messaging and calendaring apps have the same name on both OS X and iOS. “To say [OS X and iOS] should be the same, independent of their purpose? Let’s just converge, for the sake of convergence? [It’s] absolutely a non-goal,” Federighi said. “You don’t want to say the Mac became less good at being a Mac because someone tried to turn it into iOS. At the same time, you don’t want to feel like iOS was designed by [one] company and Mac was designed by [a different] company, and they’re different for reasons of lack of common vision. We have a common sense of aesthetics, a common set of principles that drive us, and we’re building the best products we can for their unique purposes. So you’ll see them be the same where that makes sense, and you’ll see them be different in those things that are critical to their essence.”

That’s just a small taste of the article. Definitely head on over to Macworld’s site to read the entire story.

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