ARM Mac Part Deux: Less Confusion

by Jean-Louis Gassée

When one considers the prospect of the Mac running on Apple’s own ARM processors, a question immediately arises: Will Apple merge the Mac and iPad into a single software product line? Will we see a hybrid device that runs both MacOS and iOS apps? I don’t think so; such a hybrid product isn’t a good, elegant, Apple-like idea.

Last week’s ARM Mac: Piece of Cake Or Gas Refinery Monday Note, in which I speculated that the rumor of an ARM-based feels serious this time, garnered more comments than usual and left me with a job-half-done feeling. I appreciate — and empathize with — the strong feelings the subject stirs up and regret not doing a better job separating the issues that such a transition poses. Today, I’ll try to shed more light on the very small number of possible outcomes.

(We’ll spend no cycles, this week, on Apple’s ability to design the chips that are needed to power future Macs. Based on past performance, and with the chip unshackled from battery-saving constraints, we’ll take it as given. Same thing for the “port” of the MacOS to ARM. Previous microprocessor transitions in the Mac went well; this one will be even smoother.)

Today, Apple gives us two distinct personal computer generations separated by more than a quarter-century: The 1984 Mac and the 2010 iPad, each running its own software on a different microprocessor. Speculation has it that come 2020, Apple’s two genres of personal computers will use the same ARM processor family and, as a result, be theoretically capable of running each other’s software. This is what can confuse us when we think about the two generations’ futures. This is the mud in our crystal ball.

With thanks to Walt Mossberg for recently bringing it up again, we can gain some clarity by re-watching Steve Jobs’ metaphor for the transition from the original PC genre (“trucks”) to today’s tablets (“cars”) in this 2 minute video from the 2010 D8 Conference. For me, three things stand out:

• The transition will be uncomfortable for many users, especially “for people like you and me”, as Jobs says to Mossberg. In other words, for long-time users of traditional PCs.
• Like real-world trucks, PCs will still be around for a long time, for a smaller but stable number of users.
• Jobs’ own view of the balance between “cars” and “trucks” wasn’t settled: “Is the iPad the future? Who knows…”

(The full 100 minute video is here. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was to be Jobs’ last appearance at the conference…)

Eight years after the birth of the iPad, few questions remain regarding its ability to support basic content creation. See, for example, Serenity Caldwell’s 2018 iPad review Drawn, written, edited, and produced with an iPad (with music composed on GarageBand).

Yes, you can create a short, smart, clean video on an iPad, but professional projects demand multiple screens, teraflops and terabytes — they still require PC trucks, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Similarly, if you were to peek into any organization that creates software, what are the chances that you’d see engineers writing, testing, and debugging code on an iPad, even inside Apple? Zero. We won’t see app developers foregoing the truck-like comforts of multiple large screens any time soon.

(You may object that I’m being a bit sly, here: Apple’s Xcode development environment doesn’t run on the iPad, so engineers have no choice. And if they did? We have the iPad Swift Playgrounds app as an example: Playgrounds lets you write code in Apple’s Swift programming language on your iPad. While Swift Playgrounds is an interesting educational app, it’s not a development tool for commercial-grade apps, a process explained here… in an Xcode tutorial.)

So far, so clear: Trucks will be used by a small but demanding segment of the population for uses that require heavier, larger bodies with specialized organs.If there is ever such a thing as a 2019 Mac Pro, its form factor and modularity are likely to survive the ARM transition. So will something like my large-screen iMac.

The view isn’t quite so clear when we turn to the iPad. Apple’s “car” (no innuendo intended) is less sharply defined than when we just had the 2012 iPad mini and the light 2013 iPad Air. Apple now offers two iPad Pros (10.5” and 12” screens), and a 2018 9.7” iPad (that sells for $70 less than the smaller 7.9” screen iPad mini 4, perhaps because it has less storage, 32GB vs 128GB for the smaller device). The top three iPad models now support the company’s Pencil, plus the Logitech Crayon for the 2018 iPad. (Dear Apple: Why is the Crayon only available through the Apple Education channel? It looks good and, unlike the official device, it won’t roll away.)

What we seem to have is, to be polite, a product line that doesn’t quite show what it wants to be. Are we going to see the iPad line evolve in two directions: A “pure” iPad strain next to a series of more laptop-like iterations?

Probably.

Simpler iPads might offer lightweight keyboard cover accessories, as they do today, but they’ll mostly be used as pure tablets, typing on the screen as we do with our phones.

Pro iPads, on the other hand, will end up sporting something like real keyboard clamshells, not the flimsy implements offered today. Who knows…maybe the Pencil will even come with a magnet like the one on my Surface tablet-PC.

But here’s where we see a potential issue, and its name is “MacBook”. As the iPad Pro matures, it would compete with Apple’s own MacBooks. And for whom would that be a problem? Not for Apple, a company that has never been afraid to cannibalize its own products. The “problem” would simply be a matter of taste for the user, as it should be. Do you go with the evolved, classic Mac with its traditional keyboard and pointing devices, or with a multi-mode touch-screen/keyboard/stylus User Interface? The former is now comfortably established; imperfect, perhaps, but well understood. The latter is still evolving, full of possibilities, including potential UI overcomplications.

Summing up, we foresee a Mac evolution that has no unknowns, and an iPad line that will divide itself into a simple iteration of the original model and a more laptop-like sub-genre.

This is, I hope, a clearer picture than the one I drew last week. Time — or my readers — will tell how correct or comically naive I am.

— JLG@mondaynote.com