iPad Marketing VP: iPad and Mac are Complementary Devices, Not Competing Devices

[tobybrut]

Ummmm didn't know that doing my invoicing, VAT filings, etc required manipulating Terminal settings... it's breeze on the Mac (timesheets, entry, etc)... it's gynmastics on an iPad that takes 3x longer...

And yeah Xcode...

You're living in fluff job bubble with manager diehards who want to avoid doing any serious work

As a retired programmer in the field for 30 years, I would never want to program Xcode on an iPad except in a dire emergency. Programmers love multiple large screens, not tiny iPad screens. Apple engineers know this, which is why they created Swift Playgrounds instead of porting Xcode. Very few would use it. I love my iPad, but I wouldn’t use it even if Apple did have Xcode on iPad. I wouldn’t use Swift Playgrounds either, but that’s basically a training wheels app.

As for mentioning Terminal, geeks love that kind of stuff, so yeah. It’s mentioned so often in so many threads over the years that it’s predictable. These geeks who want macOS tend to want Terminal while accessing the entire file system, an impossibility on any sandboxed system. I know because I’m a geek who loves to play with Terminal, though I don’t want macOS on iPad and think it would kill the iPad entirely.

 

[mrochester]

That's not even remotely true in my experience.

I've desperately wanted to use the iPad for productivity ever since I bought the iPad 2. I've bought multiple iPads over the years, and I've given it at least three proper goes to turn the iPad into a productivity machine instead of my laptop.

The pervading feeling I have is that the iPad is great if you only work using one app at a time.

The moment you need to start multitasking and using multiple apps, there is a sense of friction, of complicatedness and clumsiness that totally eats away at the work flow. It isn't intuitive, fast, or pleasant.

Another gripe is that most iPad apps also don't make much of use of their screen estate; they're essentially blown up iOS apps rather than macOS apps designed for a touch interface. Apple Music is a prime offender, but there are countless others.

What makes this frustrating is that Apple keeps producing awesome iPads with incredible performance, but there just doesn't seem to be many ways to make use of said performance.

In fact, apart from the size and quality of the screen, there's no noticeable difference between my 13" M2 iPad Pro and my 9.7" 6th gen iPad from three years ago.

It sounds like you need a Mac then.

 

[mrochester]

No, I said it wouldn’t cost them any sales if they implemented it. You said that they didn’t want to implement it in order to gain sales. I don’t think that would happen. Their sales would be neutral since shared iPads tend to be because families can’t or won’t afford another iPad. By not implementing multiple accounts, I don’t think Apple would gain or lose any sales at all since it’s all too easy to share a common family account. In other words, a decision either way does not impact their bottom line. So why not do it for good will purposes? Good will is a currency in itself, which may manifest in some way down the line but would not have any impact either way in the short term.

But the family that previously bought 4 iPads might now only buy 1 iPad and give each user their own account. So Apple didn't gain any sales from the 1 iPad family, but potentially lost sales from the 4 iPad family. I'm not sure why you think that doesn't impact Apple's bottom line. And all Apple gained was some good will, which didn't make them any money.

 

[raindogg]

Apple is the one who decided to come out with a "PRO" iPad. Apple was the one marketing the iPad as a Computer. They should have left it a tablet. No Pro, no Air. Just one iPad.

 

[mrochester]

Apple is the one who decided to come out with a "PRO" iPad. Apple was the one marketing the iPad as a Computer. They should have left it a tablet. No Pro, no Air. Just one iPad.

That would serve to simply deny people the ability to pick from different feature ranges and prices, and reduce Apple's revenue.

 

[LogicalApex]

It's a psyop from a competitor using bots and bribed influencers. They are angry at how Mac sales are improving and how iPad sales destroy their Android and Surface devices. So now they are trying to confuse the Apple community.

There's no genuine organic support for macOS on iPads.

Steve Jobs was very clear that the iPad is a post-PC device. He didn't want the vast complication of desktop operating systems on it.

Jobs also didn’t want the App Store on the iPhone either. He isn’t infallible.

 

[wbeasley]

No, I said it wouldn’t cost them any sales if they implemented it. You said that they didn’t want to implement it in order to gain sales. I don’t think that would happen. Their sales would be neutral since shared iPads tend to be because families can’t or won’t afford another iPad. By not implementing multiple accounts, I don’t think Apple would gain or lose any sales at all since it’s all too easy to share a common family account. In other words, a decision either way does not impact their bottom line. So why not do it for good will purposes? Good will is a currency in itself, which may manifest in some way down the line but would not have any impact either way in the short term.

Using one iPad between family members would need careful app installation these days.
Social Media posts and replies... video chat...

The caller doesnt know who will be answering or reading.

At the very least, iMessages could easily let someone see some message they shouldnt.
How many people are scared to show granny a photo in case she swipes the wrong way and sees something else...?

Separate IDs would solve a lot of worry. Maybe not granny seeing photos though

 

[bcortens]

I think there are two issues with his comment.

1. It highlights the greed and rot at the core of Apple's executives where they are terrified of building something that could harm their ability to sell two devices. (Covered well in this thread)
2. More importantly and less discussed is that the Mac and iPad aren't able to be complimentary devices right now and he is just wrong about that in many ways. For the Mac and iPad to be complementary users need to be able move a workflow from device to device without anything breaking and without being hindered in any way. There are still too many Apps where you cannot round trip the files between Mac and iPad and some of them are even Apple's own Apps! If they seriously want us to buy both and use both in a continuous complementary way they need to fix this issue by supporting the same files on both platforms for all of their own Apps, lead by example..

 

[Mainsail]

I have a base M2 MBA and base iPad 10th gen. For my needs, they are excellent complementary devices that are reasonably priced (both individually and in total). I use them in their respective lanes. Never had a problem.

 

[btrach144]

Apple could at least give iPadOS better multi monitor support.

Maybe come up with some Studio Display dock adapter.

These comments are an insult to us customers through. Apple needs new iPad leadership.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Jason Snell is well known inside Apple. He was at the press event for these new iPads. I know Apple employees read his stuff. I don’t believe their answer to him is buy two devices. Yet that’s where he’s at. I also don’t believe Apple employees want to see reviews that spend so much time complaining about software.

I’ll never get the, “How can something so expensive just be a media viewer,” point. There are folks with entire rooms set up to be nothing but very comfy media viewers that cost well over $10,000 in some cases! And, it can be said that, even among the iPad’s detractors, that screen makes for a very nice mobile viewing experience. So nice that not many will be able to afford it, but for those that can, they’re going to enjoy it. And, when they’re not watching media, they can engage in the Apple ecosystem.

Unfortunately, engaging in the ecosystem doesn’t require “filesystem” or “macOS” so those things aren’t offered. The fact that these people that have been Apple watching for awhile are surprised… well, no, I guess it could be they’re not surprised. They could understand this every bit as well as I do with the biggest difference being that me being able to keep a roof over my head doesn’t depend on my communication of feeling aggrieved when I don’t particularly feel aggrieved. Writing “the OS is holding back the hardware” is literally food on their plates, potentially vacations, house payments, new iPads, etc. So, they’ll continue to do it. They’ll be shocked and stunned when iPadOS continues to be what it is next year and the year after that as long as it pays the bills.

 

[mrochester]

Using one iPad between family members would need careful app installation these days.
Social Media posts and replies... video chat...

The caller doesnt know who will be answering or reading.

At the very least, iMessages could easily let someone see some message they shouldnt.
How many people are scared to show granny a photo in case she swipes the wrong way and sees something else...?

Separate IDs would solve a lot of worry. Maybe not granny seeing photos though

That's a good point; whose notifications would you see on the iPad Lock Screen? If you had a network data plan, whose account would be associated with any iMessage's sent/received from that number?

 

[ZiBart]

Because those people might want a better screen, better audio and Face ID.

Those features can still be included as a standard or an option within the base model and without creating two new models with desktop/laptop grade SoC and desktop/laptop grade pricing.

 

[ZiBart]

But would laptop sales implode?

A Macbook Air is cheaper than an iPad Prod and keyboard.

A 15" iPad doesnt exist.

So if you need either cheap or larger, iPad wouldnt cut it for you.

It's like Surface devices. They offer smaller portable ones or regular laptops.
And compete against every other laptops out there.
Most are a lot cheaper and often better than the MS offerings.
But there are few Surface tablets competitors.

They could figure out a way to differentiate for sure. I dont disagree. Its just my opinion that they choose not to believe this.

 

[theluggage]

We know Apple has Mac apps running under iPadOS in a secret room. Just like they had PowerPC Mac laptops able to triple-boot macOS, Windows, and OS/2.

More to the point, MacOS already has the ability to run iPadOS and iOS apps. Once MacOS gained touch support (...and other things like GPS and accelerometer) iPadOS would become obsolete and iPads would just boot into MacOS - the choice would be whether to start up in Launcher or Finder.

The real problem is that many MacOS apps (including the system apps & UI elements) would be unusable on a touch-only device - just as many iOS Apps are currently unusable on a Mac without touch/accelerometer. So Mac OS and its Apps would need a major re-design to make them tablet-friendly or you'd have to switch between tablet and laptop mode depending on whether you were going to plug in a keyboard & trackpad. That has echoes of Windows 8....

Apple still sells more iPads than Macs. Clearly people really like iPads and iPadOS. I think for people living in the tech-o-sphere, they want iPads to be something that they're not. But for most users, they seem very happy with what iPads can do today.

Yes, but iPads start at $350, which is obviously likely to shift more units than a $999 minimum laptop. If we were just talking about devices in the $300-$800 range then Apple's argument would be right on the nail - get a tablet for hand-held use, pen input and snapping documents, and a laptop for keyboard/pointer driven stuff.

The problem is that we're now talking about iPad Pros starting at $1000 plus $300 for a keyboard case - for that money I really wouldn't expect to need a MacBook as well.

Has anyone asked an Apple executive why they don't offer cellular on MacBooks?

No, but I suspect that the majority of customers already have a phone that supports tethering or mobile hotspot, and don't want to pay another monthly fee for a second mobile device.

I'm not quite old enough, but all these macos on iPad posts make me wonder, was the same debate going on back in the day between the original Mac series and the Apple II series?

Well, yes, obviously there was plenty of "the Mac is a toy that was useless for real computing" but the idea of designing a personal computer especially for someone who didn't want to do 'real' computing (i.e. coding) was somewhat new now - millions of parents weren't buying their kids new computers because "back to school" and there were still plenty of people in "these new fangled computers will never replace my trusty typewriter" mode. The paradigm shift between computers like the Apple II - or even the IBM PC - and the Mac was far more stark than anything we've seen recently. As was the increase in computing power of the Mac's 32 bit (internal) 68000 vs. the Apple II's 6502 or even the IBM's kinda-sorta-16-bit 8088. We also had IBM mopping up the market for business types who liked buying from salespersons in pin-stripe suits vs. hackers in black turtlenecks. Plus the Apple II was kinda outdated by then - the Apple III having been an epic fail.

Oh and they had this really disturbing advert where someone smashes a huge screen with a hammer, showing extreme disrespect to the nice man talking on it and wrecking an expensive large screen TV that could have been used to show Art.

Personally, I didn't find "classic" MacOS particularly appealing until the 00s when it was dumped and replaced with Unix/NextStep (AKA Mac OS X).

There are numerous fallacies in this. They have the same SoC, but an SoC isn’t the whole computer.

Except... it's called "system on a chip" for a reason - most of the computer (CPU, GPU, SSD interface, security/crypto stuff, media engine, Thunderbolt/USB and RAM controller is on the die - and even the RAM is integrated into the package) is on the chip and identical between the Mac and iPad. The whole hardware/firmware architecture of Apple Silicon Macs has more in common to the iPad than with the old Intel Macs. So it's a lot different than, say, expecting Windows for ARM to run on Apple Silicon where the only common ground is the ARM instruction set. I'm not saying that MacOS will "just work" on an iPad if you could hack the installation & plugged in a keyboard and mouse (although I wouldn't be too surprised) but I don't think porting it would be rocket surgery. The main additions would be drivers for touchscreen, pencil, accelerometers etc. and considering that iOS and MacOS are already very similar internally, that's probably not a massive job.

The tricky issue is - as you say - the different UI affordances between touch and keyboard/pointer UIs which would entail significant changes to UI design.

Yeah I'd hate to have to carry a MBP around the house whilst listening to podcasts. My iPad goes with me from the toilet to the bathroom for a shower, to the garden, to bed, to the sitting room.

My experience was that adding a keyboard case to my iPad turned it from a fantastic self-contained handheld device - that you could use around the house, take photos of documents and carry to meetings where you didn't plan to write many notes - into an awful laptop that you had to use on a desk and still wasn't as good as a proper Mac - and I stopped using it until I took it out of the case.

I haven't used the current Magic Keyboard cases (boy, are they expensive) and I guess the key is how easy it is to 'undock' the tablet to carry around or use the pen.

As an aside: I also had a MS Surface Book for a while - which was nice until it bricked itself and I had to return it. Basically, that was like a - fairly powerful for the time - laptop where you could "seamlessly" unplug the display and use it with a tablet, with finger or stylus. It also pulled some other tricks - the keyboard "base" had a battery extender and additional ports (and ISTR, a discrete GPU). It was pretty spendy - about £2000, but that included the tablet, keyboard and (decent, inductive) stylus. But, the only reason I could justify that was that - when docked - it ran Windows 10 Pro and was good enough to be my daily driver laptop (including graphics, coding and running VMs) and (leaving the Mac vs. PC argument for another thread) certainly bore comparison with a ~$2000 MacBook Pro. Unfortunately... it was also useless, because it tended to crash when you undocked the tablet, which got progressively worse over the course of a few weeks until it bricked itself and I had to return it (a bit of research showed this was a common problem - the moral of the story is that clever docking/undocking mechanisms and automatic mode switching just add extra stuff to go wrong). Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln...

 

[Unregistered 4U]

In other words, the only way the iPad Pro gets macOS is if they kill the iPad Pro and make a new “MacBook Touch”.

Which I honestly think they should just do that. Then the iPad lineup becomes a lot cleaner and we can finally get macOS with touch interface integrated.

Right now, the Mac is not valuable enough to Apple for it to have maintained its own separate CPU, so they are using modified iPad/iPhone CPU’s in them. Same tech, just scaled for more performance. I believe that, similarly, the mobile Mac sales one day will drop to the point where it makes no sense to design and manufacture a separate case for them. That’s when I think we’ll see them put macOS internals into an iPad type shell, somewhere close to the EOL for macOS.

 

[Rogifan]

I’ll never get the, “How can something so expensive just be a media viewer,” point. There are folks with entire rooms set up to be nothing but very comfy media viewers that cost well over $10,000 in some cases! And, it can be said that, even among the iPad’s detractors, that screen makes for a very nice mobile viewing experience. So nice that not many will be able to afford it, but for those that can, they’re going to enjoy it. And, when they’re not watching media, they can engage in the Apple ecosystem.

Apple isn’t marketing iPad Pro as a luxury media viewer. If that’s what they think it is then they should call it iPad Edition or something.

 

[Rogifan]

Apple could at least give iPadOS better multi monitor support.

Maybe come up with some Studio Display dock adapter.

These comments are an insult to us customers through. Apple needs new iPad leadership.

Good post from Steven Troughton-Smith.

The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition)

www.highcaffeinecontent.com

Apple should host a round table like they did with the Mac a few years back. Get some high profile iPad Power users in a room and get their feedback. There are people like Federico Viticci who love the iPad Pro and would absolutely be evangelists for it.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I've never understood why Apple hasnt allowed multiple User Accounts on an iPad.

Multiple user accounts is a vector for exploit. Just not having that means a fairly voluminous set of tests that don’t have to be run. It simply saves Apple money.

 

[ApplesAreSweet&Sour]

Apple is the one who decided to come out with a "PRO" iPad. Apple was the one marketing the iPad as a Computer. They should have left it a tablet. No Pro, no Air. Just one iPad.

I agree. Especially since Apple took it even further this time, stating how iPad Pro M4 is now faster for AI processing than any PC.

But Apple’s extreme product segmentation, and constant misleading marketing of its “Pro” products has only led to more sales and thus will only deepen.

Apple could have never moved the price to $999+ for iPads if there weren’t two steps on the value ladder below it.

 

[Supermallet]

I really wish Apple would embrace this philosophy. Universal control and iPad as secondary display are both great and I use my iPad this way often. But if this is what Apple as touting as the iPad’s core competency, to be a support device for a Mac, then make it so that I can hand off my Mac workflow to iPad and back at any point in the process. Even with Universal Control there are so many restrictions on what I can do with my iPad. I’m not asking for macOS, but to make iPadOS more versatile and accessible. I would kill for the iPad to truly be a complement to the Mac, and not just a sometimes useful in limited ways side piece.

 

[spinedoc77]

Makes me that much more excited for the Snapdragon Surface Pro's about to come out in a couple of weeks, best of both worlds.

 

[unchecked]

Right now, the Mac is not valuable enough to Apple for it to have maintained its own separate CPU, so they are using modified iPad/iPhone CPU’s in them. Same tech, just scaled for more performance. I believe that, similarly, the mobile Mac sales one day will drop to the point where it makes no sense to design and manufacture a separate case for them. That’s when I think we’ll see them put macOS internals into an iPad type shell, somewhere close to the EOL for macOS.

Yea so equally no chance.

 

[mrochester]

Those features can still be included as a standard or an option within the base model and without creating two new models with desktop/laptop grade SoC and desktop/laptop grade pricing.

Which would massively eat into Apple’s revenues, hence they don’t do it.

 

[mrochester]

Makes me that much more excited for the Snapdragon Surface Pro's about to come out in a couple of weeks, best of both worlds.

World of both worlds too, that’s the problem.