Apple CEO Tim Cook's tweet shows Mac production line using Windows

Apple’s PR machine is usually on the ball, but this time there’s been a slip up and it’s come from the CEO, and on Twitter of all places.

Tim Cook tweeted a picture of the Mac Pro production line in Texas. “Watching the Mac Pro come together in Austin yesterday,thanks to a team loaded with American manufacturing expertise.” Seems fair, considering Apple’s big push to bring manufacturing back to the US. But the picture with the tweet clearly showed iMacs running Windows OS. It’s not clear which version of the OS is being used, but it does look like Windows XP or Windows 7. The icons in the taskbar do make us lean towards the latter.

Now no one is saying that each technology company has everything it needs under its ecosystem. In fact, the opposite is true. Google uses the iPhone, iPad and Windows, to test its apps and given the proliferation of Mac Pros in editing studios, Apple’s rivals could very well have a fleet of Macs in that department. So Cook’s tweet is not really a slip up, but rather an admission (albeit inadvertent) that Apple is well part of this coterie, and not an island.

If anything it serves to highlight the fact that tech companies need each other as much as they want you to think you need them. And let’s face it, the talk of faster OS adoption and better numbers compared to rivals is only playing to the gallery. So the next time Cook tells an audience that Apple’s OS is being used more than any rival, that may be true, but we must not forget there’s one thing Windows is good for and that’s building Macs.