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Apple rejects tablet PC hybrids

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 30 Apr 2012

Apple rejects tablet PC hybrids

Apple CE Tim Cook claims the idea of combining the iPad and MacBook Air would "wind up compromising" both, BBC News reports.

Rival Asus already markets such products in its Transformer series, while Intel has also been a vocal advocate of the idea.

This comes after Apple reports its profits almost doubled in the first three months of the year and it sold 11.8 million iPads, 150% more than the same period last year.

Cook points out the problem is that products are about trade-offs, and believes that hybrid devices make trade-offs to the point where the product doesn't fit into any market, Xbit Labs states.

He adds: “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.

“Our view is that the tablet market is huge and we have said that since day one. It was clear to us that there was so much you could do and that the reasons that people would use those would be so broad.”

Cook noted that, in two years of availability, Apple has sold 67 million iPads, Datamation says.

He adds: "To put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and five years for that many iPods and over three years for that many iPhones, and we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products."

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