Surface Win Says As Much About Apple As It Does About Microsoft (Premium)

As you may have heard, Microsoft’s Surface beat out Apple’s iPad in the J.D. Power 2017 U.S. Tablet Satisfaction Study. But this win is bigger than Surface, I think. And it says a lot about the state of innovation in the PC world these days.

Which actually makes sense when you think about it: Apple is fat and comfortable and wants to protect its iPhone economic engine. By comparison, the PC industry is beleaguered and is fighting for its life. Innovation doesn’t come out of companies like Apple. It comes from companies that have something to prove, that are fighting for their very existence.

The last several years demonstrate this worldview nicely. All you have to do is look at what Apple has done in the wake of the iPhone—simply ape that same strategy over and over again in an increasingly expansive set of overly-familiar products—and then compare it to the amazing leaps and bounds we’ve seen on the PC side.

This battle is not about Surface Pro—which is the only Surface-branded tablet that Microsoft makes—vs. iPad, not really. It’s about function vs. form. About productivity vs. consumption. And about a tool vs. a toy.

It’s also not about the unbelievable reverse-justification that the Apple fanbase uses to excuse—sorry, “explain”—the 12 straight quarters, three straight years, of free-falling iPad sales. Which is that the iPad is so good, so well-made, and so functional, that users simply don’t ever need to upgrade them. This makes me wonder why Apple’s other products aren’t so similarly well-made. After all, the iPhone Upgrade Program exists explicitly so that customers can upgrade this expensive device every single year. Are these people going to similarly argue that iPhones, Apple Watches, and Macs are poorly-made, and perhaps even by design? I think not.

Others argue that iPhones and other smartphones have risen to make iPad unnecessary for some, that big screen devices like the iPhone 7 Plus in particular make a separate iPad purchase less necessary. That’s cute, but iPads are designed as that tweener device that can replace your PC or Mac, too, right? I mean, that was the marketing pitch. Surely, some body of users needs a larger screen and, optionally, a real keyboard. And surely that body of users—Apple fans, one and all—are just as willing to throw money at the company for a new iPad from time to time. Surely.

No, the reason people don’t upgrade their iPads all that much, and the reason that no new iPad customers have appeared out of nowhere to pick up the slack, is that iPads are simply not essential. They are almost exclusively consumption devices. They are, to be a bit too unkind, toys. And that is true, too, of the iPad Pro, which is the most tentative half-step I’ve ever seen Apple make.

Put another way, the reason the iPad isn’t more successful, and the reason this device fared so (relatively) poorly in the J.D. Power 2017 U.S. Tablet Satisfaction Study, is Apple. This company is now doing what Microsoft did during the horrible two-decade span that followed the release of Windows 3.1: It is artificially limiting any product that will in any way prevent the unbridled success of its one dominant product. Which in Apple’s case is the iPhone.

More simply, the reason the iPad fell to Surface is that the iPad of today is all too similar to the one Apple released in 2010. It’s limited in all the same areas and has not evolved in any exciting and unexpected ways. Compare today’s iPhones to the early handsets to see how different those products are: When Apple focuses, it can really churn out innovation. But when it doesn’t have to—doesn’t want to, really—it simply sits still. (Think Microsoft, with Internet Explorer, when that product was more dominant than it deserved.)

In 2010, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that the post-PC era had arrived. But today, it’s clear that Apple betrayed its own vision for this future by artificially limiting the iPad. Think about it: The iPhone was a super-computer in your pocket, an unbelievably exciting device that turned the smartphone market on its head. The iPhone was so good that all of the dominant smartphone companies from 2007—Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola, Palm, whatever—are either gone or are now just shells of their former selves. That, folks, is innovation in action. The iPhone was a destroyer of worlds.

But the iPad? The iPad was just a consumption device. Burned by that accurate assessment, Steve Jobs ensured that the second-generation iPad 2 pushed creation activities a little more explicitly. But compare that to today’s situation, with iPad Pro. Now there’s a Pencil. And that is just about the only major difference unless you consider an iPad-specific keyboard with fabric-covered keys to be a major innovation.

Regardless, iPad Pro is limited by its lack of a pointing device, file system access, and other pro/productivity features that we all expect from our PCs and Macs. That device is also an implicit admission that Microsoft and the PC industry were right about hybrid PCs, devices that are versatile and multi-function, like iPhone, and not limited like iPad. Surface wasn’t the first, but it did formalize the market for such devices. And then Apple blandly copied the form factor without really getting to the heart of the matter, which is its deep productivity capabilities.

What’s interesting about this situation, and about the J.D. Power study, is that Surface and other PC tablets/hybrids are still very much hobbled in their own way, in this case by the complexities of Windows and by the muted reaction to modern mobile features in Windows 10, like Windows Store and its app platform. And yet, Surface customers are still more satisfied than iPad customers. Curious.

Again, I think this says more about the iPad than it does about Surface or any other Windows 10 PC. This is on Apple, as so much is these days because the company is playing a protectionist game. This is not how an innovative company behaves. This is how an entrenched dominant firm behaves. And this is also how the fall of that dominant firm begins. We’ve seen it before. And we’re seeing it now.

So congratulations, Microsoft. You just better hope and pray that Apple never wakes up from the comfort of inaction and actually turns the iPad into something truly competitive. Because right now they’re just coasting. And that is the real reason Surface just beat out iPad in that study.