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.) It is likewise adding support for Bluetooth-based mice and trackpads.

And it is doing so not just for iPad Pro, as one might expect, but for most currently-supported iPads.

This is good for me, since I already have a previous-generation 9.7-inch iPad and have no desire to spend roughly $1000 for an iPad Pro I’ll never use. I also have an Apple Magic Keyboard (the original one, which ships with iMac) and an Apple trackpad of some kind; I couldn’t find it, so I tested mouse cursor support with a Microsoft mouse.

It works.

It even works well, though Apple’s own apps, like Pages, don’t yet support the dynamic nature of the new cursor. That means that it never change into an i-beam when you move it between letters of text in a word processing document. Whatever. It will.

And you can see this behavior anyway, since it works elsewhere in iPadOS, for example, in the text boxes in apps like Safari and App Store.

Right-click works throughout the OS and in apps too.

And even with just a few minutes of experience under my belt, I can already tell. They pulled it off.

They f&$%ing pulled it off.

What I mean by that is simple. For years, I’ve been openly wondering whether some mobile platform—iOS and Android at first, but now iPadOS and Chrome OS too—could ever evolve enough to replace mainstream computing platforms like Windows or Mac. To date, my experiences have been frustrating enough that I could see it hadn’t happened yet. But I also knew that Apple or Google could make some small changes and cross that hurdle. I had figured Google would get there first, partially from pragmatism, and partially because of Apple hubris.

This time, I’m surprised to be wrong: Apple got over itself and just added elegant support for mice, trackpads, and a mouse cursor to the iPad. And it works great.

Again, I must ask. Please. Stop writing that nasty comment. Stop telling me that there are things you need that just aren’t available on the iPad. We all get that. You’re not adding anything useful to this conversation. We’re all power users. All of us have something—many somethings, in some cases—that are not available on iPad.

But we’re not normal. I should say, we’re not the norm. And when you consider that most of a generation of users only turns to PCs or Macs in those rare instances where they need that combination of keyboard, mouse, and screen, and use their phones for everything else, you need to be honest with yourself and admit that an iPad would be the better choice if it just met that need. And now it does.

It’s the better choice because it’s simpler, easier to use. It’s smaller, and it’s lighter, and it gets better battery life. It’s more secure, and it’s more reliable. It’s suddenly a much better PC/Mac alternative—for most—than a Chromebook.

And it’s not more expensive, though I know many will make that case. A 10.2-inch iPad starts at just $329, and with a keyboard and mouse is still under $500. An iPad Pro is roughly $1000 to $1200 with keyboard/trackpad cover, the same or less than any premium PC. The pricing tracks.

It pains me to admit this, but this marks another terrible milestone for the PC’s decline. It puts the reality to Steve Jobs’ promise a decade ago, and it puts an end to the stream of lies that Apple emitted in the interim. The iPad was never a PC killer. Until now. This is good enough to trigger the next great decline in PC sales.

It won’t happen overnight. And for those of us—myself included—who need and prefer a PC, no worries. The PC never goes away. It’s not “dead.” But the iPad? It’s suddenly more than good enough for most people. And that’s a game-changer.

OK, fire away. I know some of you won’t be able to help yourselves.