iPad Pro: Wrong Questions
Here we go again, with the iPad Pro this time: Is it a laptop replacement? This seemingly simple question is, simply, the wrong one. What we need to ask is ‘what sorts of tasks does the new tablet and its well-executed Pencil make easier?’
It’s January 27, 2010. Steve Jobs comes onstage at an “Apple Special Event” and proposes a missing link between between smartphones and laptops:
In six words, he pronounced the raison d’être for this new device category…
… and then lists the “some key things” that the iPad was to be far better at:
A demo follows, concluding with a big surprise, the $499 price. I still recall the collective gasp that gave way to applause (full video here).
This is the Grand Master at his best, right next to the January 2007 iPhone intro. And, as in 2007, the kommentariat follows in lockstep, embarrassing itself with “it’s just a bigger iPhone”, “it’s the Newton reborn” or, from Bill Gates himself: “…there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” A tasty claim chowder compendium is here, thanks to Horace Dediu.
From birth, the iPad has been the strangest, most misunderstood animal in the Apple zoo: a furry, egg-laying, lactating, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed creature, the company’s very own platypus, apparently put on Earth to confuse computer industry naturalists.
Initially, the iPad quenched a thirst created by three decades of sometimes spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to implement a dangerously obvious, preordained idea: a tablet computer. As a result, it grew spectacularly fast — at first. In her well-regarded “2012 State of the Internet” presentation, Mary Meeker showed the iPad growing 3X faster than the iPhone, leaving its siblings in the dust:
But the misunderstandings soon revealed themselves and the trend reversed (from Statista):
Sales of the iPad — and tablets in general — have continued to decline. Some blame “longer replacement cycles” for this perplexing and persistent trend. Allow me to translate: We use our iPhones all the time and everywhere, much less so our iPads. As a result, new iPads aren’t as compelling as new iPhones and we “trade up” our iPads less frequently.
I’ve offered a different explanation. Calling the iPad a Tease, I opined that many of us, yours truly included, were seduced into expecting too much from Steve Jobs’ final hardware act, only to be let down by the product’s reality. We wanted the iPad to be a replacement for our traditional personal computers, and we were disappointed. Many tasks such as the creation of an even moderately complex document are more easily performed on a PC.
But if we return to Jobs’ list of “key things”, we don’t see Office Productivity. (Yes, the iWork suite is part of the iPad’s arsenal, but these apps aren’t meant to be used for more than light editing and sharing of documents that are created elsewhere.)
As iPhones and MacBooks continue to evolve, they’ve displaced the iPad. Much larger iPhones take “screen time” away from iPads. New, featherweight MacBooks sneak into couches and beds where iPads used to lurk and, to some users, they offer the best of both worlds. (I pay attention to what this “animal” does and have noticed how my MacBook has displaced my iPad — but not my pocketable iPad mini.)
Enter the iPad Pro.
Its size and keyboard give fresh energy to the Laptop Replacement question. As quoted in a Telegraph article, Tim Cook fuels the fire [emphasis mine]:
“[W]hy would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?…the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones…”
Well, as Bill Clinton might quibble, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”, or, in our case, how many of these many, many people are there? 25%, 50%, 100% of today’s conventional personal computer users?
Apple’s CEO counts himself among them:
“I’m travelling with the iPad Pro and other than the iPhone it’s the only product I’ve got.”
Let’s hope that he was able to wangle a Smart Keyboard before leaving on his trip to the UK.
As I write this, the Smart Keyboard and the Apple Pencil are still at least three weeks away. One assumes that the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) in charge of the iPad Pro Supply Chain now works at a procurement office for rare minerals in Mongolia’s Ulaanbaatar. (An Apple Store employee took pity on me and sold me a Pencil from a freshly arrived shipment. I may need to get another…I’ve left mine at home more than once.)
Also, I assume Tim Cook doesn’t have to actually prepare SEC filings, board room presentations, and CAD drawings for future Sunnyvale offices, but merely reviews and annotates them.
Cook’s insistence that his iPad Pro is a replacement for his laptop is presumably sincere, but it’s misguided and unnecessary. The equivocations, justifications, and vague statements about the iPad Pro are easily resolved by a For What/For Whom question, by investigating the Job To Be Done…
You work with architects, civil engineers, materials, fixture and appliances suppliers, kitchen and bathroom installers. Your iPad Pro is flat on a table while you sketch a design for the architect to flesh out, you scribble annotations on drawings and budgets, you redraw a layout by superimposing a layer on the original. The iPad Pro does more than replace your laptop.
You work for a wallpaper manufacturer and design pattern after pattern; you browse vintage nature photography for old hunting scenes, extract images that can be stylized as part of a new collection, add color swatches, overlay line drawings. The iPad Pro and its Pencil are your friends.
Before: a horizontal tablet and stylus for input, a PC with a vertical display.
Now: the computer, the display and the tablet are one — and you take it with you.
Horace Dediu put together a neat video in which he explains “The new iPad is like nothing we’ve ever seen before” and, a bit cheekily, makes the case that it truly is a desktop computer, as in a device that’s best used when laid flat on the desktop, as in the examples above.
Why, then, do so many of us — and I have been in this camp — insist on seeing tablets through PC goggles? We can meditate on the dangers of knowing too much, too deeply; we become prisoners of our deep-rooted beliefs. In a recent Monday Note on Killer Cultures, I referred to the revered founder of Digital Equipment, Ken Olsen, who said he knew people bought PCs, but sincerely didn’t understand why. His company’s All-In-1 productivity software running on a large remote machine covered all his needs. Looking at the iPad Pro, how many of us fail to see outside of our world?
In a recent piece, Living In Different Worlds, Benedict Evans concurs and concludes [edits and emphasis mine]:
“We’re all prone to apply old mental models to new things when they look like the old things. […]The challenge for a new thing is that you can fall into one of two traps — either you try to map it to the old mental model, or you decide that, since it has no existing mental model, it’s useless. So, the automobile is compared to the carriage, Uber is compared to taxis, digital cameras to film cameras, and smart watches to Rolexes. But sometimes there is no model. […] all of us have that same disconnect whenever we try to understand something new.”
Fortunately, we have children. In a Techpinion post titled The iPad Pro: The Start of Something New, Ben Bajarin tells us how his 12-year old daughter took over his iPad Pro [edits and emphasis mine]:
“So I should not have been surprised when my daughter started playing with the iPad Pro for a few hours and came back and showed me all the things she had done: movies she made, photos she took outside (which she edited/mashed up using the different apps she also uses in creative projects at school) and taking advantage of the unique benefits of the Apple Pencil. With nearly everything she showed me, I had to ask her how she did it. I had no idea some of the apps on iPad were as powerful as they were, enabling her do things I didn’t think were possible […]”
Presenting the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement for “many, many people”, or asking “why would you buy a PC anymore?” doesn’t shed much light. If you prepare complicated documents, proposals, financial filings, you should stick with a Mac or a PC.
Apple execs are fond of metrics such as the number of new iPhone buyers coming from the Android world (30%). Why not say that the iPad Pro will helpfully replace a laptop for 60%, or 25% of conventional personal computer users? In keeping with Steve Jobs’ Far Better At Some Key Things formula, why not say that the iPad Pro is a great laptop replacement for graphic designers, architects, mechanical engineers, musicians, videographers…and that the audience will grow even larger as new and updated apps take advantage of the iPad Pro’s screen size, speed, and very likable Pencil.
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PS: From the peaceful oasis of Palo Alto, where I live, or from the island of Maui where our family is now gathered for a vacation, I feel ill-qualified to comment on the November 13th atrocities in Paris. I don’t know the terror of being shot at, of seeing people bleed and die. I cannot imagine the shock and grief of families and friends. All I have is condolences, secular prayers, and gratitude to those who expressed collective or personal sympathies.
I love my old hometown, I was born there, I left 30 years ago and return often, about four times a year to our place on the Left Bank, its café culture, bookstores, museums and many other earthly and spiritual delights. I fear for its future but hope its vitality will win the day.