About the Things That Stick

The iPad coin toss story from last week ended up missing something important. One of the last times I wrote about iPad, back in 2015, concluding thoughts went something like this:

If someone asked me which iPad to buy, I just wouldn’t know what to say. (…) Overall I’d probably recommend that if you already have any iPad, skip upgrading this year.

Last week’s announcement of iPad (2017) changes this sentiment; from now on it’s very clear and simple to find a tablet recommendable for almost anyone. iPad Pro models, especially the 12.9" one, get way too close to price of laptops after accounting for accessories that make them pro, and these pro features are not why people consider buying a tablet in the first place. iPad mini 4 is too close in price, while being behind in specs, to be a good choice.

iPad is the clear winner here. It’s cheaper than Pros by a large margin, more powerful than equivalently priced mini, and easily better than any Android tablet. It’s obvious it will sell. It’s simply a good device at a great price.

Lineup is still a mess even though clearing up one Air and one mini model from the iPad product range is a step in the right direction: Pro comes in two sizes which are not exactly the same feature-wise; iPad mini 4 is the only with a generation number in the name. The whole history of iPad model names is very similar like Fast & Furious titles, with the difference being that latter intentionally have a different naming scheme in each installment.

What’s really interesting is seeing how Apple is doing a Samsung approach: try a bunch of things with iPad and see what sticks. Like Samsung tried pretty much everything with Galaxy product range over the years until they hit it big with Note, so is Apple doing similar “innovation” with iPad. All devices get faster, thinner, with better display and longer battery life. With iPad there’s a sense of lacking direction when it comes to everything other than incremental innovations. iPad range first got smaller and cheaper, then much bigger and more expensive, then they got expensive optional accessories, they became Pro at higher price, and now they are going back where they started. Difference between today and 2010 is simply that we can buy better spec’d iPad at lower price than we could in 2010; there were no category altering features in between.

By category altering I mean having one key feature that requires significant sacrifice in some areas, often counter-intuitive, but which turns out to be so good that after initial hesitation pretty much everyone in the market follows suit. Apple did it many times over, perhaps most notably when they made an expensive phone with large multitouch display and no physical keypad, to the amusement of Blackberry and others. Samsung also did it when they made a gigantic Galaxy Note, to the amusement of Apple. Both have taken away something that was taken for granted: in former that was a set of buttons for texting and e-mailing, and in latter it was the possibility of using the phone one-handed. As we know today it turned out that having a big touch-enabled display is so good that not having a keypad isn’t a big deal after all, but also that having a huge HD display is so good that it’s okay not to be able to type on it one-handed. One could easily make the same argument about laptops, which sacrifice power for portability.

iPad, or tablets in general, didn’t yet get such a category altering moment. And perhaps the best thing to do until someone figures out the next step, really is to make a good device at great price.

Surprise here is that we’re used to Apple figuring out the next step.