The king is dead, long live the king
MARCH 23RD, 2016 — POST 079
Apple yesterday held its Spring event from the Town Hall at its Infinite Loop campus. Filled with hard words on the ongoing encryption battle between the company and the FBI and warm words on renewable energy, reuse and recycling of materials. But most people don’t tune in for that. Apple’s events have drawn the eyes of the public for years with the expectation of new hardware. Despite having the bulk of the information about the annoucements in advance from comprehensive leaks, there’s still a hope that in watching you’ll be privy to a curve ball, a surprise that could influence the course of consumer electronics for the next few years. This was definitely not that event.
Everything that was leaked was delivered exactly as expected. iPhone SE, 9.7” iPad Pro, Apple Watch bands and configurations. Well, actually, this is first time in memory that the products announced actually fell short of that which was leaked. The iPhone SE, predicted to look like an iPod Touch or a scaled down iPhone 6s, really just looked like a two-year-old iPhone 5s (like practically identical). But it was the 9.7” iPad Pro that really missed the mark. This miss joins a line of recent misses that are illustrative of an institutional ignorance or disregard for the fundamental ways in which the products Apple sells are used.
The 9.7” iPad Pro is really the modern iteration of the very first iPad. The 9.7” screen size has not changed since the product’s first release, through the iPad Air nomenclature, to now as what’s being pitched as a smaller alternative to the 12” iPad Pro. To my mind and I imagine a lot of the market, though, this 9.7” iPad Pro is the default iPad. The “Pro” suffix comes from a feature set the new iPad shares with its bigger brother: four speakers, improved camera, better display, and Apple Pencil compatibility. Introduced with the 12” iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil is the first-party digitizer used for drawing, notetaking, annotation, and really anything you’d want to do with pen and paper (as Apple are quick to tell you). With the 12” iPad Pro, and presumably the new 9.7” version, the most comfortable and logical way of using the Pencil would be to lie the iPad flat on a table, like you would a piece of paper, and get to work. Except you literally cannot do that with the 9.7” iPad Pro. The new iPad is prevented from lying flat on a table, prevented from being used in the most comfortable and logical way, by the bump of its improved camera. The same bump that caused the iPhone 6 and beyond to rock when placed on a table has made it to the very product you expect to be able to use in this exact arrangement. Instead, the fundamental usecase has been compromised in the name of a better camera on a 9.7” device. Not only do you not need a 9.7” iPad to have an outstanding camera beyond something that is just functional, you sure as hell do need the product to be able to be used in exactly the way it is most comfortably used.
This madness of design has been well-documented in recent months. Apple is now a company that sells a rechargable mouse that has to lie on its back unusable whilst charging. These read like bad jokes, like an SNL skit lampooning the dogma of a tech supergiant. If only they could be forgotten as easily. We’re at a point now where the company who for years was making some of the most compelling consumer hardware just isn’t anymore. But the quality hasn’t slipped so far for the competitors to become attractive options either. For those like myself who enjoy the richness of the iOS App Store, who rely on software specific to Mac OS X, who expect timely updates to a mobile OS, we just have to put up with this.
Yesterday’s event might have been the first time that a statement of “the best ever” was incorrect. Apple’s best versions of their line of products are not the ones they currently sell.
And they don’t seem to care.
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