The iPad Mystery. New Episode: Food Fight Strategy.
by Jean-Louis Gassée
From its very beginning, the iPad has had trouble answering the What Is It? question. The newer iPad hardware and software line up seems to add to the confusion with more Mac-like software and accessories.
We’ll tear our eyes away from the insalubrious Musk-Twitter copulation now turning into a ménage à Trump. And turn to Apple, a comparatively demure company that recently disclosed its full Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations for the previous quarter and for all of fiscal year 2022.
The numbers are generally healthy, revenue grew by close to 8%, there was a 5% increase in profit, and, remarkably, R&D spending was up by 20%! As Tim Cook said in 2016, “We believe in investing during downturns”, a sentiment he maintains to this day: “You don’t save your way to prosperity.” True, Apple recently announced a hiring slowdown (except for positions in its AR/VR projects), but even that caution is a ray of warmth in the current gloomy context of massive tech layoffs that have spared almost no one…
Less sunny are iPad’s numbers:
Despite Apple’s effort to strengthen the iPad line by building a dedicated iPadOS operating system, sales have slumped. For the last three months and over the full year, Mac revenue is heading up while iPad sales are falling.
The iPad has a troubled, seesaw history. After a meteoric rise in sales following its 2010 launch, revenue began to decline in 2013:
Thus was reborn the launch day debate: What exactly is the iPad? Is it a big iPhone or a Mac subset? In 2010, Steve Jobs, known for his affirmative, ringing positioning statements, hemmed and hawed with eerie prescience:
“iPad has to find its place between the iPhone and the Mac.”
When Microsoft started marketing its Surface range of laptops, devices that added a touch screen to conventional Windows machines, observers wondered if Cupertino execs would follow Redmond’s lead and adda touch screen to the Mac. Would they, in effect, merge iPad and Mac? This led to cutting, dismissive statements. No way Apple would make a “toaster fridge”.To explain the iPad’s importance, its role in the company’s future, CEO Tim Cook often made the following statement:
“The iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.”
Cook insists that he only needs an iPhone and iPad when traveling — no Mac on the road. An enviable situation, but not a universal one.
A few weeks ago Apple introduced its latest revision to the line, from the colorful 10th generation iPad with new accessories, to the iPad Pro with a high-end M2 processor:
This is ambitious. I’m reminded of the 1925 GM tagline, “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose” although for the iPad, “Every Purse” is both literal and rhetorical: You have a choice of a wide range of sizes, with starting prices from $329 for the older 9th generation device to $799 for the iPadPro.
The Pro can be equipped with a more powerful stylus, pardon, Pencil and a new Magic Keyboard Folio complete with a row of function keys and a back panel that folds into a stand. Steven Sinofsky, former Windows President and declared iPad fan, winkingly pointed out the resemblance to the Microsoft Surface:
More seriously, critics have been unimpressed (or worse) with the iPadOS version of Stage Manager, a multitasking feature (also made available on macOS) that’s meant to offer a better way to manage multiple applications and windows.
Heretofore, the iPad has been cautious in its allotment of screen real estate. Initially, it allowed a single app that occupied the entire screen, and then two apps that could share the screen…and now it has jumped to Stage Manager, which lets multiple applications float independently on the screen.
Unfortunately, initial notices have been less than kind. In his helpful and thorough iPadOS review, expert Apple observer Federico Viticci concentrates on Stage Manager’s “Intersection of Bugs, Missing Features, and Flawed Design”. The Verge is disappointed by the incoherent design that “feels totally disconnected from everything else about the iPad” and buggy execution. In summary, “This is not the iPad multitasking you’re looking for.” In a long Twitter thread, Steven Sinofsky agrees [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:
“This dynamic ends poorly. The reason is no matter what is done, Stage Manager will never match basement expectations. Even the most mainstream reviews (or Best Buy sales people) will have heard the verdict from the basement. Stage Manager will always reflect this negativity.
I’ve been there.”
(Context: I'm a Steven Sinofsky fan. Among other activities, after a long (1989-2012), fruitful Microsoft career, he now publishes Hardcore Software, a memoir of benedictine patience subtitled Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution, a great weekly read for subscribers.)
In the meantime, the version of Stage Manager that runs on macOS — a device that doesn’t lack for multitasking capabilities — is given generally positive reviews. Perhaps someday we’ll find out why Stage Manager development went so differently on iPad and on Mac.
Where does this leave the iPad? Does Tim Cook still think that “The iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing”?
What we’ve seen in recent years are efforts to make the iPad more powerful, more helpful in more usage scenarios. But the expanded utility has come at a price: The iPad has become more complex and, in the latest salvo of hardware and software announcements, more Mac-like.
Given his exhortation to Tim Cook and his team use their own judgment, it might be inappropriate to wonder what Steve Jobs would think of the current iPad line, but one has to wonder about the loss of simplicity that Steve gave the device. The iPad’s recent creeping “Mac envy”, the abandonment of intuitive intelligibility for dubious “productivity” features reminds one of the proverbial Food Fight Product Strategy: Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Apple isn’t immune to injecting bad ideas into its products, but it’s quick to correct the worst of them, and rarely abandons a public feature altogether. Maybe we’ll see a new, intuitive, helpful version of Stage Manager for iPadOS soon, ideally (for Apple) before Christmas.
We’ll know more when the Holidays quarter numbers are disclosed next January.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
