Years ago when I was a Microsoft MVP for Tablet PCs I attended an MVP Summit in Redmond. It was an exciting and stresssful moment for Tablet PC advocates, of which I was one. The winds of change were kicking up and hinting that Microsoft would favor Touch over pen based Tablet PCs in the future. For broader context, the PC Pundit industry had already declared the Tablet PC a largely failed niche device.
Then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was to give the keynote and take questions from the audience. As I lined up to ask a question I noticed that he was taking notes on a piece of legal paper. I never got a chance to ask my question which is probably a good thing because I changed what I had prepared to ask. Had I gotten the chance I was going to ask why he wasn’t using a Tablet PC to take notes. It certainly would have made a big statement if he had done so. It certainly did make one that he didn’t.
Preparing to watch Apple’s recent Let Loose announcement about new iPads I was reminded of that moment in watching the usual, now almost cliché, iPad criticism flow through my social media timelines. There are two routinely rhetorical responses about the iPad:
- The iPad lineup is confusing.
- The iPad Pro needs to be more Mac like and/or run macOS.
Each of the above is true. Clichés are rooted in variants of truth. Yes, there is confusion, but on the first point I think Apple largely let loose the air out of a that balloon.
There’s now an easy roadmap to follow if you’re interested in a full-sized iPad. $349 will get you an iPad without many of the bells and whistles, perfect for a child or a mother-in-law. You can spend upwards of $3000 for the fully kitted out iPad Pro. Or you can settle in the middle for a $700 starting point for the iPad Air that now includes most of the technology previously only seen in the iPad Pro lineup. That all makes good sense to me. Oh, and the iPad mini is still around and I’m guessing we’ll see an update of that later this fall.
Apple is largely to blame for the second confusion point, due to a rare misfire in its marketing years ago. Before we had Apple Silicon in MacBooks things weren’t looking great for the MacBook. There was lots of talk about the iPad being the future and what it would take to make it so. Apple even launched a What’s a Computer? campaign in 2017 promoting iPads that helped confused the issue.
Tech pundits took their cue. They pushed the envelope on their devices and pushed Apple to keep on keeping on and the iPad Pro (introduced in 2015) kept getting more powerful and more capable right along side the “The iPad is the only computer I need but it needs more” stories. But hardware is only part of the story.
Things continued to get confusing when Apple split the iOS operating system into two and birthed iPadOS in 2019. Certainly that hinted at more to come from the software. Even so, the software narrative continued to feel incomplete while the parallel story of the immediate success of Apple Silicon Macs intensified the dissatisfaction.
Now, let me be clear. I’m not one of those who feels the iPad needs to be more Mac like or run macOS. Could there be advancements to iOS? Yes. I’d love the File system to work more intuitively. Quite frankly, I’m fine with how iPads sort of multi-task now, Stage Manager being the exception.
I use an iPad Pro with a keyboard at times, but I mostly use it as a tablet in landscape mode for work with an Apple Pencil. I’m a use the right tool for the job kind of guy when it comes to tech. Since both Microsoft and I abandoned Tablet PCS, an iPad has always been the right tool for most of my work in the theatre, alongside a Mac for portions of that and other work. I don’t see that changing, given that I’ve tried most of the other tablet options out there. Let iPads be iPads and Macs be Macs. Trying to be all things to all people doesn’t work in life, and I don’t think it works in tech.
In my view, the “iPadOS isn’t complete until it can be a Mac software” story has created a myth like reverse branding similar to the negative one of Microsoft’s Tablet PC. So much so at this point, I don’t think Apple will ever be able to counteract it, even if it did create an iPadOS that runs macOS or some version of it. And that’s a damn shame.
I made this comment prior to the Let Loose event, yesterday.
I could very easily be wrong, but I don’t think we’ll ever see that mythical iPad that some wish for. Personally I don’t think it’s necessary and I’d be more than happy if we just let iPads be iPads and Macs be Macs. We’ll see how and if the story changes at WWDC in a few weeks. I’m guessing it won’t and I’m just fine with that.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 