Given that how slow Apple is on refreshing its desktop Mac lineup, it is widely considered by many that the company has given up on the lineup completely. However, CEO Tim Cook has reassured the company’s employees that Apple still remains committed to desktop Macs.

Posting his response in an employee discussion board, Tim Cook said that Apple has “great desktops” in its roadmap and “Nobody should worry about that.” He further adds that desktop Macs are “really important, and in some cases critical, to people” because of their superior performance, the variety of I/O ports they offer, more storage and memory options, and more. And in typical Apple style, Tim Cook says that the company’s “current generation iMac is its best desktop lineup ever and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.”

Cook also answers questions relating to Apple’s future roadmap and what makes it different from other companies. He says that the biggest differentiator for Apple is its culture and people, which are the foundation for everything the company does. The “change the world” and “good isn’t good enough” attitude inside the company helps its employees to take bold decision and come up with magical products. The CEO also says that the secret sauce of Apple is to focus on things where software, hardware, and services can all come together to offer a very cohesive experience.

Apple was widely expected to announce its refreshed iMac and Mac Pro lineup besides its new MacBook Pros at its ‘Hello Again’ event held in October this year, which sadly did not happen. At this point, Apple’s iMac lineup is more than a year old, while its Mac Pro lineup features internals that are over 3 years old. The company’s entire desktop lineup is in a dire need of an update, and as things stand right now, there is a huge I/O disparity between all of Apple’s devices due to the different refresh cycles that the company is operating on. While the new MacBook Pros come with only USB Type-C ports, none of Apple’s desktop Macs feature even a single USB Type-C port.

Are you happy with your existing Mac desktop? And are you frustrated waiting for Apple to refresh its iMac and Mac Pro lineup with faster and powerful internals?

The full replies from Tim Cook are below:

We had a big MacBook Pro launch in October and a powerful upgrade to the MacBook back in the spring. Are Mac desktops strategic for us?

The desktop is very strategic for us. It’s unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop — the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.

The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world. 

Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.

What do you consider to be Apple’s biggest differentiator, and what can employees do to foster and advance those efforts? 

Our greatest differentiator is our culture and our people. They are the foundation by which everything else comes about. Without great people and a great environment that people can live in, we wouldn’t have intellectual property. We wouldn’t have the best products. We wouldn’t have the inventions or features I mentioned earlier. 

I think it’s that “change the world” attitude and boldness that’s deeply embedded in our culture, that “good isn’t good enough.” All of this is the fuel for everything else that we do. 

From a strategic point of view, we also focus on things where software, hardware and services all come together and bring out the magic that only Apple can. That’s our secret sauce. It shows up in a lot of different places, and it’s something that we look for in new employees. 

You can rarely see precisely where you want to go from the beginning. In retrospect, it’s always written like that. But it’s rarely like that. The fantastic thing about Apple employees is they get excited about something, and they want to know how it works. What it will do. What its capabilities are. If they want to know about something in an entirely different industry, they start pulling the string and see where it takes them. They’re focused more on the journey, which enables so many great things to happen. 

Just in the past couple years, pulling that string on Watch and fitness led to ResearchKit, and ResearchKit led to CareKit. We’ve got a ton of things on our roadmap that I can’t talk about, but that I’m incredibly excited about, that are the result of pulling that string and not being bound by the box that so many people in life get bound by. 

With so many things that we’ve done, we don’t do it because there’s an return on investment. We don’t do it because we know exactly how we’re going to use it. We do it because it’s clear it’s interesting and it might lead somewhere. A lot of the time it doesn’t, but many times it leads us somewhere where we had no idea in the beginning.