Why the iPad Pro is both awesome and disappointing.
It boils down to ‘backward compatibility’.
Why it’s awesome
Apple has a more or less unique talent to throw away everything and start again from first principles.
Starting from greenfield gives obvious advantages, like imagining how a computing device would work in a perfect future. And in that future we don’t need to deal with all the legacy filesystems, workflows or software that has not been optimised for the new thing.
This results more often than not in genius-like, category-defining products. Hardware-wise the new iPad Pro is nothing other than astonishing.
When you read the reviews it becomes clear that everybody would love to accomplish all their tasks on an iPad — giving Apple the benefit of the doubt.
Why it’s disappointing
Yet they can’t — and not because they are not used to it or because they dislike the interaction design — simply because they can’t DO their stuff.
To make things crystal clear, I’m not questioning the cheap iPad line. The entry-level iPad has its use case as “accessory”. And $300 for an additional device are fair enough. The recent “outrage” is about the iPad Pro.
You could say the iPad Pro-line is also made to be an accessory to the Mac. But:
- Apple’s own marketing tells us that it is meant to do “what you need from a computer”.
- It’s absurdly pricy as a second (or third) screen. A basic configuration with pencil and keyboard case totals roundabout $1,500 (which is in line with other recent price hikes, but misses the mainstream by a lot.) The Verge says it bluntly:
Then, who is this device for? Well, if I could save myself buying a laptop it certainly doesn’t look that expensive any more.
But almost nobody can.
If you look close, it’s often the same pattern. The hardware enables something (like connecting an USB drive), the software, namely iOS, obstructs it.
Why is there still no mouse support? There are some analysts writing defenses like this one, taking a page out of the computing history book.¹
I think we shouldn’t put into question that someday most of us in most of situations will work in some sort of Touch-first setting. That’s a given to me. Just look at the implicitness with which younger generation use Touch and considers every screen that isn’t Touch-enabled as broken. The new paradigm will come and after that the next paradigm will come and so on.
The question is not IF, the question is HOW the transition will happen. How will we get from A to B?
And here, I argue, Apple dropped the ball.
Actually the example of mice is perfect to make the counter-point: The transition from Keyboard-first to Mouse-first was possible because people were free to still use the keyboard. To this day you can use macOS or Windows almost exclusively with the keyboard. The fact that nobody does this anymore speaks for the inclusion of fallbacks and not against it. If you are afraid that the new paradigm then will not become accepted, well then maybe the new paradigm doesn’t deserve a future after all.
In the very same fashion the transition from CLIs to GUIs was only possible because people were free to still use the CLI.
The Pencil is maybe mightier than the mouse. But that’s not what’s holding the iPad back. It’s that it’s lacking all forms of backward compatibility for the remainder of so-called edge cases. If I can’t do something with the iPad, I simply can’t do it. There is no additional safety net.
Yes, even files will eventually be gone (like mainframes are “gone”) in 10 years (and it will be great!). But in the meantime there’s a transition.
Many things ran on mainframes for years after PCs took over. Many things ran on DOS for years after Windows “won”. Many things ran as Win32/OSX apps even though phones dominate computing.
It’s the job of Apple to make the switch as easy as possible for users. We have to deal with a serious psyschological phenomenon called loss aversion. To be precise, every industry has to deal with it. It doesn’t matter that the one missing feature is only used once a year — when the user thinks he needs it, he will be reluctant to switch without the feature.
It’s surprising that Sinofsky doesn’t take this into account since he spend 23 years working in the ranks of Microsoft, the unquestionable king of backward compatibility.²
Apple is known for getting rid of stuff very fast. I remember the first MacBook which was missing the CD-ROM drive. But back then, they offered a very solid external drive, you know, just in case somebody still wanted to burn CDs. Using an external drive was certainly more cumbersome than having it integrated, but it was possible. Where’s the equivalent now?
Furthermore, why does iOS still block all emulators? The availability of virtualisation on macOS helped Apple more than I think they would admit (getting Windows switchers who needed that one piece of software). The same could be true on iPad as well — if Apple would just allow it.
Like GUIs had CLIs as a backup, Pro tablets should be able to work with files (as a backup).
This notion that files aren’t important is ignorant of the last 20 years — even the non-experts grasp the concept and use USB flash drives every day.
Apple is the only company that prevents one actively from accessing the filesystem. Google on the other hand shows how a Files app can look like not limited to dry folder hierarchy.
That’s the same kind of philosophy that prohibits the user from defining their standard app for mail, browsing, calendar etc. If you bury a toggle deep in the settings app, why would users that Apple tries to protect with this measure (at least that’s their argument) even care?
Don’t despair, I think iOS 13 will fix this. One of the best aspects of software: It is improvable after shipping (at least in internet-connected devices). Maybe Apple will announce these Pro features in a big bang, like they did with iCloud and the flat design of iOS 7. I prefer slow and steady updates, but apparently that doesn’t work well enough with Apple’s marketing department.
On the other hand: It’s been very long 9 (!) years. Perhaps Apple thinks it can sit this one out until people adapt their workflows to their devices instead of the other way around. I doubt that will happen.
[1] Originally this section linked to a tweet by Steven Sinofsky, who is referenced later on. In the tweet he suggested that the iPad doesn’t need mouse support. The tweet got deleted.
[2] I applauded Microsoft for trying to make the “2-in-1” model work, but I also recognised that so far the plan hasn’t worked out. Here too, it’s the software.
