2023-08-12 14:00:00
As someone who is very tech-savvy, I occasionally get carried away with innovative ideas that end up failing. Some recent examples were the Snap Spectacles (who are still alive), the LG Wing and the Essential Gem.
Despite their failures, these are some of my favorite products of the last few years for one simple reason: they took a risk and tried something different.
On the left, the LG Wing, a rotatable phone with two screens; on the right, the Essential Gem | Photograph: The Verge
In Samsung’s case, I see a bit of that with the line Galaxy Z. Although I still think that this whole category is an interesting technological exercise to solve a problem that nobody has, Samsung continues to update the devices, annually eliminating its main problems. I wrote about it recently in this article.
And what about Apple? It would be easy to say that the Vision Pro is this innovative and potentially cretinous product. But, in reality, there is another product occupying this space, insisting for almost ten years that it is the future. I speak, of course, of iPad Pro.
After its release in 2015, I was 100% sold on the idea of working only on the iPad Pro. I retired my Mac, bought the Smart Keyboardadapters, or Apple Pencilmore adapters and I dived into the world of automation with Workflow (today, shortcuts), IFTTT, Zapier and the like to get around iOS limitations that prevented me from working on an iPad made for… working.
More than that, I preached the lifestyle word iPadistic with the same obstinacy that Elon Musk fans are currently wasting to defend the cesspool that Twitter has become. When someone criticized the iPad, I felt attacked. Refuted. “What do you mean you can’t really work on the iPad? I’m proof that it works, yes! It’s different from the Mac way of working because it’s the future!”
For about three years, until it worked. But you know what? The truth is that working on the iPad Pro was a hell of a job. I ended up going back to the MacBook Pro in 2018 and have never looked back. That’s when I understood the criticism from Mac users, who kept saying that Apple now only had eyes for the iPad. In the Mac world, almost nothing had changed in three years.
2018 was an interesting time. On the one hand, Apple was still proclaiming that the iPad Pro was the future of personal computing. On the other hand, she tried placate the concern of Mac’s gang which, justifiably, was abandoned. We were at the height of the controversy butterfly keyboard and the biggest news of recent years had been, ironically, the Touch Bar. (And the commercial “What’s a Computer?” definitely didn’t help.)
It is worth remembering that this was also a kind of dark period in the relationship between Apple and Intel, when delays in the evolution of processors greatly disrupted the calendar of Mac launches. It is natural that Apple saw in the iPad Pro the hope of a market with unexplored and profitable potential.
The problem is that the iPad Pro failed at a secondary mission: pique the interest of the general public for the rest of the iPad line. Because of this, Apple gradually gave up features and compatibility exclusive to the iPad Pro, and brought them to the rest of the line. Today, all iPads are compatible with the Apple Pencil (although one of them in a very strange way). Many have Apple-made keyboards with trackpads. O iPad Airinexplicably, has a chip M1. Even the newly released Logic Pro e Final Cut Pro for iPad are not exclusive to the Pro model.
But even so, the iPad won. Last week, Apple revealed financial results for the third fiscal quarter of 2023. US$81.8 billion billed, $5.8 billion came from iPads. A lot, right? Not exactly.
On the 26th of July 2016, that is, when the iPad Pro was already available in versions of 9.7 and 12.9 inches, it released financial results for the third fiscal quarter of that year. Of the US$42.4 billion billed at the time, $5 billion came from iPads.
This means that, while Apple’s revenue grew 92% between 2015 and 2023, iPad sales increased only 15% in this same period. More than that, the representativeness of the iPad in the company’s total revenue it fell almost in half.
Well then. In the meantime, Apple gave its arm to twist. In the end, the future of personal computing was not the iPad, but the Mac. It invested again in the line, presented the Apple Silicon, returned the ports and connectivity that Jony Ive had taken away, and the public responded. After years of pent-up demand, the reward came in the form of an increase in revenue that reached 70% not second fiscal quarter of 2021.
I don’t think it’s exactly a controversial statement to say that the iPad, and especially the iPad Pro, never really panned out as Apple intended. More than that, the company has spent the last few years stripping away the unique perks of the iPad Pro, yet the entire iPad lineup just seems to struggle to keep its head above water. It’s true that the iPad Pro is the most popular model in the US, but that’s not exactly a very high bar.
Amid these maneuvers, what little reason the iPad Pro had to exist seems to have disappeared. Apart from the larger screen, its other differences compared to the iPad Air, for example, are things that time will resolve (ProMotion, ultra-wide camera, Face ID, Thunderbolt, Wi-Fi 6E, etc.).
And speaking of a bigger screen, there was such a 14.1″ and/or 16″ iPad Pro that became a rumor in 2021, it could be launched in early 2023, it started to be scheduled for later, it runs the risk of never see the light of dayor maybe it’s not even Pro.
Now, if that bigger iPad is released, and it’s not a Pro model, you know… right?
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