Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Although Apple released new MacBooks and redesigned MacBook Pros this year, one area of the Mac lineup could still use some attention: the desktop. The iMac was last refreshed in October 2015, the Mac Mini was last refreshed in October 2013, and the Mac Pro dates back to December 2013.

In an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch, Apple CEO Tim Cook briefly addressed the importance of Mac desktops in the lineup. He did so to quell skepticism in the media and possibly among Apple’s own staff. The full quote reads:

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.

Some of these delayed refreshes can be blamed on Intel, whose CPUs’ rate of improvement has slowed significantly in the last three years. The iMac is already using the newest available processors, despite its age. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro, on the other hand, are both using chips that are two or three generations old at this point. The Mac Pro in particular is a sort point, since it’s being sold with the exact same specs, and its price hasn’t change since it launched three years ago.