iPad at 10: Now What?

by Jean-Louis Gassée

Ten years ago, Steve Jobs announced his latest and, unfortunately, last product. At first, Apple’s tablet took off faster than the iPhone but now seems to have lost some momentum. Today, we look at what happened and wonder what might come next.

2020 starts out well for Apple. On January 28th, the company announces record revenue and profit for the December 2019 quarter, results fueled in great part by the iPhone’s return to growth: Apple’s smartphone revenue reaches $56B versus $52B last year, a 7.7% increase after eight quarters of decline. Apple’s other product categories, such as Wearables and Services, also perform nicely. But there are two flies in the contentment ointment: Mac revenue decreases 3.5% to $7.2B, and iPad revenue loses almost 11%, down to $6B.

For today, we’ll leave the Mac alone and focus on the iPad’s fortunes, present and future. How did Apple get here, and what can it do to reengineer growth for the product the company’s CEO likes to extoll as “the clearest expression of Apple’s vision of the future of personal computing”?

In an October 2019 Monday Note titled iPadOS Discoverability Trouble, I wrote about the trouble with Apple’s efforts to give more powerful multitasking features to Steve Jobs’ last “dent in the world”. The iPad wanted to be more than just a larger iPhone, so the company gave it its own forked branch of the iOS tree. The iPadOS delivered a rich set of laptop-like multitasking features: apps running side-by-side, a Safari version worthy of a desktop PC, dual browser windows, and even a timid apparition of support for a mouse.

This set up a trap. While the dedicated iPadOS brought new life to the possibilities contained in a larger screen, there was an unavoidable tension between the original simplicity of the one-finger iPad interface and the new potential for a laptop-like feature set.

Traditional PCs come with a menubar and pull-down menu that help us discover what the user interface offers, no documentation required. Not so in iPadOS where the multitasking features lie hidden. One’s recourse is to go to Apple’s iPad Multitasking support pages. The documentation bugs I found when writing last October’s Monday Note have been fixed, but I — and all the technically versed people I know — found the working of many features befuddling and the overall multitasking philosophy difficult to discern.

The “How” has dowsed the enthusiasm for the “What”.

Late January 2020 we find ourselves celebrating the iPad’s 10th birthday. This gives us an opportunity to re-read Walt Mossberg’s thoughtfully optimistic piece titled Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

“After spending hours and hours with the iPad, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.”

Ten years later, the “potential to change portable computing profoundly” has been negated by the mysterious complexity and poor accessibility of the iPad’s new features. When the iPad was born, many of us loved the one-finger UI simplicity and hoped it would come to dominate the staid WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) paradigm. The trap Apple seems to have fallen into is in trying to ape some of the features of the old UI model without quite duplicating them entirely. Not as powerful as a classic PC UI, but without the simplicity of the original iPad.

The mouse-driven interface is alive and well and, instead of celebration, we hear a bit of garment-rending in Ben Thompson’s piece titled The Tragic iPad that concludes thus:

“Instead, as Apple is so wont to do, it tried to fix the problem itself, by making the iPad into an inferior Mac. Thus the multi-tasking disaster Gruber decries, which not only is hard-to-use for consumers, but also dramatically ups the difficulty for developers, making the chances of earning a positive return-on-investment for an iPad app even more remote. Indeed, the top two developers making in-depth iPad apps are Microsoft and Adobe, in service to their own subscription models; the tragedy of the iPad is that their successors were never given the space to be born, which ultimately has limited the iPad from truly succeeding the Mac.”

Ben Thompson’s learned piece is worth reading in its entirety as it deals not only with the UI trouble discussed today, but also with the ecosystem trouble stemming from App Store pricing decisions.

John Gruber, a well connected and articulate Apple observer, wrote an article titled The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 where he laments iPad’s failure to live up to the potential we thought it held:

“The iPad at 10 is, to me, a grave disappointment. Not because it’s “bad”, because it’s not bad — it’s great even — but because great though it is in so many ways, overall it has fallen so far short of the grand potential it showed on day one. To reach that potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.”

Gruber’s piece is also worth reading in its entirety, especially where it goes into the iPadOS’ multitasking troubles.

(For a fair and balanced perspective, one will profit from reading Steven Sinofsky, the former President of Microsoft’s Windows Division. In a piece titled The 10th Anniversary of the iPad: A Perspective from the Windows Team, Sinofsky offers insights into what “the other side” thought.)

The iPad situation is serious. As an old warrior of the early Mac years recently said, one worries that Apple’s current leadership is unable to say No to bad ideas. Do Apple senior execs actually use the iPad’s undiscoverable and, once discovered, confusing multitasking features? Did they sincerely like them? Perhaps they suffer a lack of empathy for the common user: They’ve learned how to use their favorite multitasking gestures, but never built an internal representation of what we peons would feel when facing the iPad’s “improvements”.

Finally, let’s consider the bottom line: iPad revenue is down 11% compared to last year’s Xmas quarter. Apple CFO Luca Maestri rationalizes the slump as a “tough compare” because of last year’s product introductions, but an 11% revenue decrease is too big a number not to be a market vote. Let’s hope it’s also a wake-up call. And stand at the ready to watch how Apple finesses a way to extracts itself form the hole it dug. Perhaps at the next Developers Conference this Spring?

JLG@mondaynote.com

Monday Note

Media, Tech, Business Models viewed from Palo Alto and Paris

    Monday Note

    Media, Tech, Business Models viewed from Palo Alto and Paris

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