“Yeah,” agreed Bergeron, on the extended Mac team since 2002. “Not right. You just don’t like it.”

There are many reasons why Apple is the world’s most valuable company. Tim Cook is celebrated as a supply chain Maester who has internalized the focus on innovation that his predecessor inculcated in the culture. Jony Ive has drawn global raves for making Apple a design icon. Its marketing and branding practices set industry standards. But a visit to the lab where its legacy products — computers — are made suggests another reason.

Sweating the details.

A less-than-perfect noise isn’t a product killer, or even an official bug. Nonetheless, Apple’s engineers were determined to make sure the new iMac’s Magic Mouse 2 made a better sound as it glided across the desktop.

Of course, as far as iMacs are concerned, a larger question lingers: Why even bother with a desktop computer? After all, only a month ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook, showing off the new and humongous iPad Pro and its new keyboard, proclaimed, “iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” Does that make iMacs relics of a fading past? Steve Jobs himself foreshadowed the question in 2010. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he said at the D Conference that May. “They are still going to be around [but only] one out of x people will need them.” Could it be that in the mobile age, iMacs, even shiny new ones, are dull engines of computational load bearing?

Phil Schiller

“It’s not that simple,” says Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We are in an amazing time where there are different ideas competing for your computing life. That’s great — we love that. And we have thought long and deep about what choices we want to offer customers. One is iPad — it can do many things you want to do on a PC, so many that people choose to make it their primary computing device, and it can do that. That’s more true with the iPad Pro than it’s ever been. But that’s not everybody. There are other people who will decide that nothing does the things they need in their lives as well as a Mac.”

Schiller, in fact, has a grand philosophical theory of the Apple product line that puts all products on a continuum. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.

“They are all computers,” he says. “Each one is offering computers something unique and each is made with a simple form that is pretty eternal. The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”

Good question. And the answer?

“Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no computer has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because of its capabilities,” says Schiller. “Because if all it’s doing is competing with the notebook and being thinner and lighter, then it doesn’t need to be.”

Which brings us to the new iMac product line. Despite the fact that Apple revenues and profits are dominated by its iPhone success, it still considers Macintosh as a serious part of its business, and according to Schiller, this iMac is a significant part of that. (Apple does not break out iMac sales from the Macintosh numbers, which lately have been a bit below five million per quarter. It sells about ten times as many iPhones than Macintoshes.) “We care about it deeply,” says Apple’s VP of Macintosh Product Marketing Brian Croll, who has been with the company since 2001.