Full Photoshop on iPad Pro May Be a Game Changer (Premium)

Full Photoshop coming to iPad Pro may finally usher in the post-PC era that Apple has been promising for several years. And it comes at an auspicious time, with the power of Apple’s processors reaching PC-like levels and PC sales flat-lining.

It’s a bit too early to write the PC’s eulogy, of course: It’s still not entirely clear how full-featured the iPad Pro version of Photoshop will be.

But with Adobe finally taking this important first step, it’s only a matter of time. And as one of the most important remaining PC-only workflows succumbs to a mobile device—arguably, video editing is the other—you can kind of see the future that Apple has promised but failed to deliver on start to finally materialize.

So how full-featured is this product?

“Redesigned for a modern touch experience, Photoshop CC on iPad will deliver the power and precision of its desktop counterpart,” the Adobe announcement notes. “Photoshop CC on iPad will let users open and edit native PSD files using Photoshop’s industry-standard image-editing tools and will feature the familiar Photoshop layers panel. With Photoshop CC across devices, coming first to iPad in 2019, you will be able to start your work on an iPad and seamlessly roundtrip all of your edits with Photoshop CC on the desktop via Creative Cloud.”

Reading between the lines, here’s what I see in that statement.

First, the big deal here is getting PSD—the native Photoshop file format—working on iPad. This enables users to use a new device type as part of their normal workflow.

Second, I think that “start your work on an iPad” bit is key. Adobe doesn’t (yet) believe that most Photoshop users will actually complete their work on an iPad. But they will start some projects there. And then “roundtrip” them to a PC or Mac to do work that will still not be possible on iPad.

That may give some PC partisans a bit of peace. But I will point out that this roundtrip capability is important on a number of levels. And that this is the language that Microsoft used when it first brought Office to the iPad: The idea here is that the file your working on will remain “whole” no matter where it’s edited—PC or iPad—and that using the lesser device will not degrade the internal formatting of that file.

In other words, yes, this is just a first step. But it is an important one that will have significant repercussions for the future. The iPad is growing up.

Also, we can’t look at this announcement in isolation.

That is, while Apple did not add any important changes to multitasking on iPad Pro in the recently-released iOS 12, as it did a year earlier in iOS 11, there are two related developments that speak to the growing maturity of iPad as a productivity tool.

First, Apple is set to announce two new iPad Pro models that significantly improve the device family from a form factor perspective. And I suspect that a more professional keyboard cover and/or add-on keyboard will be part of that announcement (though this hasn’t been rumored, to my knowledge).

Second, with ARM-based processors increasingly infringing on the low-end of the Intel performance curve, it is Apple, whose processors are widely acknowledged to be the best in class, that is most likely to get there first. Many believe that this will result in Apple’s A-series processors appearing in future Macs, and that makes sense to me. But this more clearly means that Apple’s iOS devices, especially the iPad Pro, can compete with real PCs from a performance perspective, especially when used for productivity tasks.

In other words, when Apple has talked up the “post-PC era” so far, whether at the original iPad launch in 2010 or at its more recent iPad Pro announcements, it was just talk. But with the stars finally aligning—Apple’s processors and iPads getting better, and Microsoft and now Adobe bringing full-featured PC productivity apps to the platform—that post-PC era is starting to come into focus.

So we’ll see what 2019 brings. But I think Adobe just made the announcement that puts the iPad Pro over the top from a productivity/PC replacement perspective. And that’s true almost no matter what workload you’re talking about. Almost.