Thinking About iPad (Premium)

When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPad in 2010, he carefully positioned it as a new category of device that was different from, and superior to, both the PC and the smartphone. And while his initial justification for the iPad—”the question has arisen lately, is there room for a third category of device in the middle, something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone?”—was perhaps poorly argued, Jobs never intended this device to be limited to consumption activities like browsing the web, listening to music, and watching videos. A point he thought he had made by announcing iWork for iPad during the keynote.

Jobs was so upset by this misconception—he claimed to have received over 800 complaints about the iPad’s limitations within 24 hours of his announcement—that he resolved that the next version, iPad 2, would “emphasize ways to facilitate creation by the user.” And one year later, he took to the stage with a new message and a new positioning. He didn’t pull any punches in defiantly taking on the doubters.

“We’re here to talk about Apple’s third post-PC blockbuster product,” he began. “Right? That’s how we think about these things. We started off in 2001 with the iPod, our first post-PC product. And we’ve been at it ever since. In 2007, we added the iPhone, and in 2010 we added the iPad. And every one of these has been a blockbuster. So we’re in a position now where the majority of our revenues come from these post-PC products.”

The constant repetition of “post-PC” there is, I think, important and deliberate. The phrase also appeared on-screen in a classic example of his clear communication style. But he wasn’t done.

“And when we introduced the iPad a little less than a year ago, we said it’s ‘Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.’ Now, people laughed at us for using the word magical but, you know what? It’s turned out to be magical. Right? And people weren’t sure that it was an unbelievable price. Well let me tell you. Ask our competitors now. [Here, he was interrupted by knowing laughter.] And they’ll tell you.”

The iPad 2 was thinner and lighter than its predecessor, and it arrived alongside an innovative and elegant new Smart Cover that answered another criticism of the original version. But the iPad’s positioning had not so subtly shifted. It now supported all 65,000 iPad-specific apps that developers had created over the previous year–“creation apps, … a lot of apps for business and vertical markets like medical,” Jobs enthused—a huge advantage the iPad 2 had over the second iPhone from several years earlier. And it also ushered in two new Apple creative apps, iMovie and GarageBand for iPad, to hammer home its creator credentials. The iPad was now exactly what its critics had said it was not, “a game changer.”

This new positioning might have silenced some of the complaints, but it raised some new concerns as well. If the iPad was part of the post-PC world, then the Mac was most decidedly part of the PC world, an old-fashioned tool that was presumably not as important to Apple now as it was to its users. If the iPad evolved to be powerful enough and the usage numbers shifted enough, perhaps Apple—which had dropped the word “Computer” from its legal name the same day it announced the iPhone in 2007—might also drop the computer from its product lineup.

That may sound far-fetched today, since we know that the Mac has survived and thrived, in part by successfully transitioning to the same Arm-based chips that Apple uses in its post-PC products. But it was a real possibility in mid-2011, when the Mac represented just one-fifth of Apple’s revenues compared to about 50 percent for the iPhone (the same as today, roughly).

And it did nothing but raise questions, especially as the years went by and Apple eventually ran into the inevitable problem of appeasing two audiences—for iPad and Mac—that had different priorities. Would Apple compromise the purity of its product vision by making the iPad more Mac-like? Would it fully embrace the post-PC world it openly touted in 2011, or was that just marketing talk?

Over a decade later, we still don’t have the answers. Apple has, at times, seemed poised to take the next step with the iPad, only to deliver half-hearted multitasking features, hardware and software, that ensure the Mac survives. And it has likewise, at other times, imbued the Mac with functionality that debuted first on iPad, including the ability to run iPad (and iPhone) apps.

Indeed, Apple’s marketing has been all over the map. The most notable—and confusing—example being the “What’s a computer?” TV spot that debuted in late 2017 for the iPad Pro. This ad so incensed customers—iPad and Mac fans, alike—that Apple removed it from its YouTube channel after it was brilliantly parodied by Zebra Corner in a NSFW form.

But it wasn’t just the disconnect of “What’s a computer?” that rang false. There was so much more.

Steve Jobs passed away in late 2011, and it feels like Apple has been committing a slow-motion, multi-tiered crime with the iPad ever since. It’s walked back the ideals that Jobs held dear. It has confused the market with far too many models, price points, and incompatible capabilities. And it has handicapped the device to ensure it can never fully displace the Mac.

It’s difficult to imagine Jobs, who had disrupted the iPod with the iPhone before another company could do it, accepting any of these strategies. Surely, a Jobs-led Apple would have disrupted the Mac with the iPad Pro by now and formally declared the post-PC era to be the era after the PC, and not an era that still includes the PC. Tim Cook’s Apple has chosen complexity over simplicity, all in the name of the holy dollar that Jobs claimed was never the goal.

Like all complexity, this happened over time. Apple expanded the iPad range to include an iPad Mini lineup in 2013. It added the iPad Air in 2014. And then the iPad Pro in 2015, alongside the Apple Pencil, a peripheral type Jobs actively campaigned against for the last decade of his life. During this time, the iPad went from a single form factor with a handful of configuration changes related to storage size and cellular data availability to a confusing matrix of devices.

Not including previous generation iPads that were kept in the market to meet lower price points, Apple had two iPads in 2013, three in 2014, four in 2015, and then five in 2016 when it added a smaller iPad Pro. Today, there are six discrete iPads, but the matrix of devices is more confusing than ever thanks to overlapping peripheral compatibilities, screen upgrades, and more. It’s no longer possible to briefly explain what an iPad even is anymore. Because it depends. What do you want it to be? Do you want to spend $349? Or how about $2,599? Both are possible today.

The problem here is that the iPad no longer has a single purpose or point. It’s not the future of anything, it’s just another thing, a family of things that offers a constellation of capabilities. But the irony, if we can accept it as such, is that where the iPad truly shines, where there can be no debate, is in the consumption tasks that so angered Jobs in the wake of his original 2010 announcement. If you want a thin, light, portable device for tasks like reading, listening to music and audiobooks, enjoying videos, viewing photos, and playing games, there’s iPad and there’s everything else.

But if you want a thin, light, portable device for creative tasks—creating and editing music and videos—or productivity tasks like writing, crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, making a presentation, and the like—then we need to have a conversation. There are iPads that can do those things, but they’re not necessarily ideal. They’re not optimized for those tasks. Not even the iPad Pro models.

In an interesting parallel, Apple’s response to this obvious problem was to announce powerful creator apps like Logic Pro for iPad 2 and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 this past week, just as it had announced iWork for iPad back in 2011. But these apps don’t address the real issues with using an iPad for creative or productivity work. This isn’t about specific apps. It’s about the operating system. And whatever one thinks of the traditional form factors provided by today’s Macs, those products run an operating system that is optimized for those tasks. And until Apple crosses that particular Rubicon, the iPad—well, the iPad Pro, really—will always be compromised. Less. Ill-equipped for the job. An expensive toy to all but the handful of users whose needs happen to be addressed by today’s weird combination of features.

As always, Jobs said it best.

“If there’s going to be a third category of device, it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone,” he argued at the iPad launch in 2010. “Otherwise, it has no reason for being.”

A decade and a half after Jobs uttered those words, Tim Cook keeps expanding this category to include ever more models, and he keeps pulling the rug out from under those who still believe in the dream. I’d like to at least experience that dream. I’m curious about it, wonder if it’s viable today, what the world might have been like if the protectionist needs of Apple’s current leadership didn’t keep standing in the way of innovation.

And while I’m not necessarily a part of that world, I bet many Apple fans wonder the same thing.