Tim Cook and Phil Schiller talked to journalists from Wall Street Journal about the new OS X Mountain Lion and about the future of Apple products and what they reveal is extremely interesting. Cook claims that the new versions of OS X Mountain Lion will integrate more and more elements from iOS and we are talking not only about design elements but also functions. Apple will try to "unify" both operating systems, but not in the way you imagine, but will try to offer the functions under the same names on both iDevices and Macs in the near future. As an example, the iCal and Address Book applications are given, which in Mountain Lion will be called Contacts and Calendar, but there are also important changes in the Reminders and Notes applications.
Named "Mountain Lion," the new version of Mac OS X is the clearest sign yet of Apple's belief that the mobile, laptop and desktop world are destined to converge—and that Apple wants to be a catalyst. "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."
Perhaps more important than the statements regarding the unification of some functions from iOS with OS X is the one regarding the possible use of the same chips in the company's products. It was rumored that Apple could make the transition from Intel processors to ARM processors in its line of Macs, Tim Cook denied the rumor but now brings it back up to date. He says that Apple is considering such a move and that its engineers are checking various configurations that could work on both Mac and iPad and would offer superior performance to those in current products. Practically, Cook claims that in the future chips like the current A5 chip could be universal and could work on any Apple products, but I for one think it will be a long time until then.
Mr. Cook said he already thinks of Apple's iOS and OS X operating systems "as one with incremental functionality." He said both laptops and tablets will continue to coexist, but he did not rule out that the technologies could converge further. When asked if Apple's iPhones, iPads and Macs might run the same microprocessor chips, he said: "We think about everything. We don't close things off."
