Ten Years Late, the iPad is a Game Changer (Premium)

With the release of iPadOS 13.4 today, Apple has finally done what its fans and critics alike have been begging for: It has added support for a mouse cursor that can be used with external mice and trackpad. There is no reason to be coy about this addition, which is a game-changer. Apple might literally have just changed the face of personal computing forever.

Please. Hear me out. And please, just give your knee-jerk reaction a few minutes to breathe before you head angrily to comments to air your opinions. This isn’t easy for me either, despite the fact that I’ve been nervously predicting this future for years, all while simultaneously believing that Apple simply didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to pull it off. But they do. And they did.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad in early 2010, he gloated that it would usher in the so-called post-PC era, and that his tablet---free of external keyboards, mice, and styluses---would take over the world. That didn’t happen, not exactly, since PC makers still sell about 250 million PCs every year, outselling iPad by a wide, wide margin.

But it did happen, sort of, as well. Not so much because of iPad, but because of mobile in general and iPhone and smartphones specifically: Since 2011, the PC market has fallen by one-third, unit sales-wise, and while 250 million units are nothing to sneeze at, that’s a drop in the so-called bucket compared to the billions of smartphone sold each year.

The iPad experienced its own several-year sales nosedive, too, something many Apple fans either forget or just pretend ever happened. Apple finally reversed that slide by doing the obvious for any company not named Apple: It released a really low-cost (for Apple) iPad model. Since then, iPad sales have mostly risen slightly each quarter.

Before that, however, Apple first tried to reverse the iPad sales dive by doing something a bit more typically Apple: It released a set of even more expensive iPads called iPad Pro. These iPads included support for a stylus, called Apple Pencil, and they evolved slowly to embrace some PC/Mac-type technologies like USB-C. They shipped alongside a keyboard cover that was conspicuously missing a trackpad. And they worked with Bluetooth-based keyboards, just like normal iPads do.

Despite that, Apple didn’t do all that much to make the iPad Pro seem “pro.” Its convoluted multitasking gestures came to other supported iPads as did, eventually, the Apple Pencil and ever (on some models) that keyboard cover. They had and have better and bigger displays. USB-C support. And ... well, higher price tags. They’re just not that special.

But with iPadOS 13.4, announced alongside a new generation of iPad Pro tablets, Apple is doing the unthinkable. In addition to releasing a new keyboard cover that includes an actual trackpad, it is adding support for a dynamic mouse cursor to iPad for the first time ever. (Well, outside of a terrible accessibility feature.) ...

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