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9.7-Inch iPad Pro Is Apple's Last Chance To Save the iPad Line (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes from an article written by Yoni Heisler on BGR: The iPad occupies a unique place in the annals of tech history. Upon its release in 2010, Apple's first stab at a tablet quickly set sales records. Not only did early iPad sales outpace early iPhone sales, but the iPad quickly became one of the fastest selling consumer electronics products of all time. The iPad's once-auspicious journey, however, would eventually take an unexpected detour. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, soaring sales began to taper off, even as Apple began to introduce newer and more advanced models. Today, iPad sales are still slumping. During Apple's most recent earnings report, the company revealed that year over year iPad sales fell by 25% while iPad related revenue dropped by 20%. Hardly an aberration, iPad sales have been dropping for well over two years at this point. And whereas Tim Cook once took to earnings conference calls to praise the iPad, he now finds himself forced to defend the iPad against a barrage of analyst questions. Yesterday, Apple released a new 9.7-inch iPad Pro and it stands to reason that this is Apple's last chance to truly inject a bit of life into a faltering product line.
If your product does not offer any improvements over the one the consumers already have, and if it has to compete with an ever more crowded market space sales of course will dwindle. Apple might consider increasing the live cycles of their products. After all, there is no point in offering a product with better performance if hardly anybody wants it. I myself am an Android user. Changing from Motorola Droid to Galaxy S2 and than to HTC M9 were always great improvements. But now with the M10 on the horizon I cannot imagine why I should want one.
The only way I'm buying a new iPad is if my current iPad breaks. But my current iPad works just fine and has so for 5 years, so why would I buy a new one?
The ipad doesn't offer a superior experience anymore. it offers a much higher price that people are now unwilling to pay for a device that will likely only be relevant for a year. If they want to stay in the market, they need to cut the price significantly and actually start competing.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Thanks for YHO.
Compare and contrast ipad and the various actual computer lines.
Naturally, sales have declined. Those of us who really wanted one already bought one. I don't need another one. I especially don't care that the newer ones have faster processors and higher resolution because mostly I use it to read email and surf the web. So I plan on using the one I have until it fails. Oh, and I'm planning on replacing the batteries soon, despite Apple's efforts to make that difficult. Maybe that's what they should have planned on: selling us all iPads with replaceable batteries, and then selling us all new batteries in a few years.
I'm sure I'll be in the market for a new tablet one day, but I think Tim Cook and I have very different ideas about the practical lifespan of these devices.
Revenue on ipads is 7 billion and that's just last quarter. So yeah it's down from 8 billion. boo hoo. It's only several times Tesla's revenue. The difference being it's profitable and Tesla isn't.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yeah, the tablet market is going to mature way quicker than the PC market. Then you gotta plan obsolescence - esp. never ever allow easily replaceable batteries, or stop updates for specific models after some years - or people are going to keep theirs until they die.
By that time MS will actually have a decent low end tablet on the market, and the market'll moved to some even more crippled consumer-orented device which has no input at all and you just watch whatever the provider wants you to see at a particular time, scheduled to fit in with the average person's day.
I'm an Apple fanboy - full disclosure. I love my MB Air and my iPad Air but there's no way an iPad the size of anything smaller than the Pro has a chance of being a "laptop killer." But the Pro's are too damn expensive. If Apple was serious about the iPad being the thing that would phase out laptops or be the next generation of whatever then they need to drop the price by _a lot_. I have no idea if that's realistically possible without being a loss-leader, but it's pretty much the only way they'd even come close.
Bark less. Wag more.
The problem is expectations, not the product.
Almost everyone who wants an iPad now has now, the product has moved into a longer term replacement cycle, rather than a first purchase cycle.
I purchased the iPad in 2010, then the iPad 2 next year, then the 3 the year after that. After that, I did buy a 4, and passed the 3 down to my kids.
We kept the combination of the 3 and 4 for awhile, only replacing them last year with a pair of iPad Air 2 units with 128GB each. Expensive, but they'll be good for a LONG time now... My hope is to get 4 years out of them before they need replacing, time will tell how that works out.
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Keep in mind the iPhone is next in line for this. The iPhone 6/6s and 6 Plus/ 6s Plus are both "fine". We have a pair of 6 Plus models that we have no intention of replacing with a 6s, or even a 7 for that matter. Probably will wait past the 7s as well and see what the 8 offers.
These devices have been going through massive improvements year over year, but at some point they get "good enough" for everything you want to do with a phone.
They can't make them bigger while keeping them phones, so the size limit has been reached. The CPU is plenty fast for anything we do on them.
Watch the next 2 years, the iPhone will see the same slowdown in sales.
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It has been a huge mistake on Apple's part to so completely depend on these two products for sales. They have (or had) a window to move the Mac line along and provide another option besides Windows, but they will never be anything but a small corner of the market with their current Mac product line. Shame, because I've love some competition there.
A styrofoam cup is as good a beer vessel as a ceramic stein or a pub glass but which one feels nicer in your hand and do you enjoy more. Since enjoyment is what you seek, sometime luxury goods are not about optimizing cheapness. I was passing through the electronics store the other day and fiddled with the pads they had on display. The ipad was clearly the smoothest and most beautiful interface. it just lept out of the line of generic looking rectangles. touch it and the response just seemed lively.
If I were buying a dozen then price would matter. but i'm buying one. Why would I not want the funnest one for an extra couple hundred? It's a nice thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think that the answer is "market saturation". There's only so much call for tablets, period. They're a semi-durable good, so if you introduce it fast enough, it's entirely possible to get one into the hands of 'everybody' wanting and able to afford it relatively quickly. Now that 'everybody' has one, you're reduced to selling replacements, which means that, roughly speaking 20% of current owners will buy a new one each year, with another 5% or so of 'new participants', while you loose 5% or so due to competitors, changing interests, even things like deaths.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not much into Apple stuff, closed systems and all that. But I made an exception with the iPad when it debuted. The reason being that there were no alternatives. The iPad was a product without competition, a new thing in the computer ecosystem, but with the background of thousands of iPhone apps.
What really took me by surprise was the time that it took for other companies to duplicate the tablet concept. Even if they were already making smartphones. I mean, you may need genius to have the idea and believe in it and make the first table. But once somebody had success with it, you just have to make a bigger phone, by Jove! My memory may fail me, but I think it was at least two years between the first iPad and the first solid competition, I think a Samsung with a stylus.
Just saying that, up to now, Apple has had a visionary at its helm, that could discover, or create, new markets. Also it had really sloppy competition, at least from the point of view of a customer. I think both things are gone now, so it's not a wonder that sales are winding down. Don't expect things to change in the near term. A bigger screen is certainly not going to cut it.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
These "death of the ipad" articles are bloody loopy.
Sales are dropping, but that CERTAINLY doesn't mean it's not an incredibly popular device.
Here's some hypothetical reasons I think sales could be dropping.
Android tablets starting to genuinely compete.
Some business sales going to the Surface, since it transcends that whole, Windows laptop / tablet world
but the number 1 reason I suspect sales are dropping,... so many god damned people own an ipad now and anything above an ipad3 is a perfectly suitable little device for checking mail, facebook, netflix, photo viewing. People are not feeling the bug to upgrade.
Will they still upgrade? Damn straight. Will it be as often? No.
Personally, considering how many god damn ipads are out there, I think a 25% drop in sales is not the end of the world. The ipad has replaced many a desktop, now it too has reached a 'good enough' level of performance (like the desktop) so sales will taper to a more natural replacement and upgrade cycle.
It's a non story.
I had a first generation iPod Touch that I used for eight years to read Amazon Kindle ebooks. When the battery stopped working, I got an iPhone 5c because it was $100 less than a current generation iPod Touch and I was out of contract on my cellphone. I later traded in the 5c for a 6s because Sprint gave me a good deal. It's unlikely that I'll trade the 6s in anytime soon, as I typically hold on to a cellphone for three years.
How many iPads are out there still being used? I think a lot of people have iPads that are finally getting to the end of useful life (battery life, not enough memory, no support for newest features), and I think there will be good reasons for them to upgrade to a newer iPad rather than switch to something else.
Sure, eventually something new will come along (AR contact lens displays with gesture control and subvocalization speech input or direct brain interface), maybe Apple will catch the next wave, maybe they won't.
Personally, I think the "home server/personal cloud" might become an important new direction (especially as a way of handling the madness of connected devices in the home), and a tablet device would still be an important part of that.
After all this time we now know that a tablet is a tablet. Not a laptop. Especially when you run a OS like IOS that simply doesn't have real world appeal for enterprise. You can call it a Pro all day long Apple. Its still a iPad. I think the iPad is a perfect media consumption device, but plenty of other cheaper devices are just as good for that. Apple did not need to go up the ladder of price, it needed to make cheaper iPads for more people. I can guarantee many parents like myself may like Apple but won't buy a iPad for kids. They will buy a cheaper Amazon Fire or Android tablet. If enterprise buys anything like a tablet, it will most likely be Windows OS not IOS or Android.
So should they have called the iPad Pro the iPad Apps instead?
Mr. Cook wanted people to replace their 5 year old PCs with iPad pros.
Yet he did not announce mouse support in iOS.
He does realize most of those "old" PCs are used for Excel at work or a gaming rig at home that still plays new titles on lower settings right?
Apple should find a way to merge tablets and laptops so that an iPad can be an iMac by plugging in a mouse and keyboard and vice versa.
People WOULD be willing to shell out such money if it means they don't have to buy two devices: a laptop (or desktop) and a tablet.
But, that may not be an easy Holy Grail. MS and Google are trying hard at it also with mixed but improving results.
I'd like to see if the plug-in "keyboard" cannot also have extra processing power and batteries so that one can get full-blown laptop/deskop performance when in "laptop mode". It would still run the same software in tablet mode (no keyboard), just slower.
That way the tablet doesn't have to carry the entire burden of laptop-level processing, and is thus lighter.
Table-ized A.I.
Like everybody else, I have an iPad. It works well. With no compelling reason to buy another one, I won't.
QED
Actually, I was planning to buy an iPad Mini until I won one in a contest. It's smaller than my regular iPad and a better fit in the cockpit as an electronic flight planning tool.
...laura
Click-bait headline for sure. Tablet sales as a whole are really hurting. It's not just Apple, it's everyone. No one is doing well in the tablet category right now. Seems they aren't getting most to replace their devices every year as they have been able to do with phones and most companies aren't on the same type of renewal cycles at this point as you see with computers.
I am surprised it doesn't have an advert for how awesome the Surface Pro 4 is.
The Surface Pro 4 *IS* awesome, but it costs too much...
Yes, it is a nice light full Windows machine, but unless you have money coming out the wazoo, it just costs too much for the vast majority of people.
$499 for an iPad is a reasonable price for a high end device, the Surface Pro is twice that.
I don't think they are selling THAT many iPad Pros, are they?
600 million PCs are over 6 years old and people keep using them & PC sales are down while Apple's Macs are going up.
Given what a lot of those people need when they do replace them, what do you think they will choose?
I think maybe Apple are starting to have the opposite problem. People are getting sick of devices that work well until they update to a new version of iOS, possibly pushed into doing so by apps breaking, and then don't work as well as they used to any more. Tablets aren't just the cool new toys now, people actually want something that does useful things. Once bitten, twice shy, and unlike smartphones there's nothing to promote a regular upgrade cycle for tablets that doesn't feel expensive because the cost is hidden in monthly contract fees.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's a thing Steve Jobs told everyone they needed. Turns out they didn't need it.
Decline! Tablet market as a whole is down. Most people only use them for consumption, inside their home or office. Even the plastic crap that a lot of the Android vendors are peddling will last a while with that usage model, so when you start talking about well built tablets like the iPad or TabS, the damn things should last forever barring breakage or too many charge/discharge cycles. The one that comes to mind that will probably break this is the SurfacePro, because it is a full windows machine and MS is trying to make it straddle the laptop and tablet worlds, hence more needed upgrades... presumably. SDLeary
The problem is, yes there was an unfulfilled market for something *like* an iPad, and Apple did that, the problem is that it's a small market and it saturated quickly.
For most purposes though a tablet is totally useless. (Office work, heavy duty gaming, pretty much anything involving content creation).
They'll still sell, but there isn't a growing market there. The only way to sell more if to drastically reduce the cost, at some point some potential buyers will decide 'well it's cheap enough that' ....
Not a win for Apple.
Next. Apple Watch.
titling a post 'last chance' — is really trolling.
people were predicting the death of the Mac for twenty years — the iPad is still bringing millions of dollars of revenue (not loss) for the company.
does apple kill off apple TV because it doesn outsell the iphone? no — they keep it, because it fits into the overall design and usage patterns of many users very well, and has the best (human-vetted) software library out there.
the ipad isnt going anywhere.
jp
This is Bullshit. The problem with the iPad is that is it so well made that people who bought them are still using them. iOS 9.3 still runs on an iPad 2. For what most of us use an iPad for, web browsing, email, lite things like that, an iPad 2 still works FINE.
Heck, I still use my iPad 1, which is stuck on iOS 5. The thing works fine for Web and email, and for reading things with Good Reader and music stuff with UnReelbook.
Would I like to get an new iPad? Sure. But I don't have the $$$ to afford it at the moment. Will I when my iPad 1 dies? Yes, I will buy a new iPad. Or when my other iPad, an iPad 4, dies? Yes. But I don't see them dying for a while yet.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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iPad Pro destroyed Surface in Q415 the highest sales quarter of the year, the holiday sales period.
Apple sold 2 million iPad Pro computers, compared to 1.6 million Surface tablets.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The "problem" is that most iPads currently in user's hands work perfectly fine, and there is no need to replace them. Yes, iPad 1 and 2 are slow and obsolete. There's nothing wrong with the rest.
Phones are an entirely different matter. In the first world, at least, there is peer pressure to have "the latest" and actually there are some real benefits (camera improvements, radical speed improvements, larger screens, touch ID, ApplePay, etc. etc. etc.) to recent iPhone models.
I see no good reason to upgrade my iPad Air2. I'll wait for at least the next one. (I have a 1 and a 2 as well, I keep them just because I am a developer.)
Of course it's market saturation. Market saturation will be addressed by rolling out updates that obsolete the existing iPads and sales will settle to a new lower but steady stream.
It's not possible to have 30-50% growth year over year forever!
Article states "Hardly an aberration, iPad sales have been dropping for well over two years at this point." No, not "Well over" two years. Just "two years". Maybe two and a quarter years, but that's not what comes to mind (and probably intentionally so) when you hear "well over two years".
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/...
I'm really not an Apple customer. Really. I see people with iPhones and feel pity.
That said, the products are really awesome. Apple does what Microsoft cannot -- and Jobs said it better when he said "Microsoft got no taste". It's not just that they can't do it, they really can't even bring themselves to try to do things with a sick perfectionism. Which is what make everybody go "Wow!".
With that out of the way... what do we want tablets for?
It's not to be a big-sized phone: for that we have, uh, phones -- and phones are better at being phones than tablets. They're lighter, fit on our pockets, feel/look less clumsy etc. etc. I like to think tablets cover the field between phones and notebooks.
Apple (and Google, BTW) miss a great opportunity to introduce important features in tablets for a more advanced use. Things like not having a single app running full-screen; new interactions which can profit from the bigger screenstate; use as real tablet, stylus and all; maybe bigger sizes etc.
The single problem affecting tablets is how to carry them. And Apple is poised as the perfect agent to promote a change in views, fashion and modes of usage that can make carrying a tablet sort of a fashionable thing. It's about making a cultural change. New technologies like folding/rolling screens, virtual keyboards, all this can make the product more interesting.
Just:
a) don't make a big smartphone;
b) make it work on "real men" tasks until they can displace notebooks;
c) and make they capable of running Linux (OK, maybe that's asking too much).
As others have pointed out.
Mom got sold an original iPad Mini, right before a new one came out (the Mini was already several generations behind at that point).
It's still a nice device.
She doesn't play games. She doesn't do anything else computationally or graphics-intensive.
Just email, Facebook and maybe a news-app then and now. Or a recipes app.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
iPads last a long time, and as fast as they sold initially, it's not surprising that most of the people who want one already have one.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
... The 9.7" iPad "Pro" has 1/2 the RAM(2 Gigs) compared to what the 12" iPad Pro has - 4 Gigs.
So it's not really an iPad Pro. Its' an Air 3, with pencil support($99) and a hookie adaptive display. All for $100 MORE than what the iPad Air2(2 gigs of RAM) sold for, the day before.
For a company that supposedly had to put all it's eggs in one basket, they chose to really skimp on the RAM, and seriously degrade/fragment, what an iPad Pro really means to developers and customers.
Crap like this is the reason Steve Jobs used to snub his investors, as well as all those so-called "analysts" who get paid to talk shite about stuff they proclaim themselves to be "experts" of.
It's a strange business, "market analyst" (sometimes known as "tech writer"). Too often, it's that guy who dropped out of CS and transferred to the humanities department. They convince their editors that they're computer geniuses, because they can write a macro in Word. But ultimately, they're paid to talk or write shit that sounds just reasonable enough that people say, "oh yeah, that must be true". Even if it isn't. and it don't even matter if it isn't. Today's shocking article is completely forgotten the next day, as long as it got the clicks.
So here we have this "last chance to save the iPad" click-bait. WHAT "last chance", Dingleberry? Like the investors are going to fire Cook and close down iPad production forever? because the iPad has reached a bit of market saturation and isn't shitting Tiffany diamonds like it once was? Shee ittt. It's a damn good product, better built than any Android alternative I've seen out there, and is even giving Microsoft's Surface a run for its money (damn, Satya, make the keyboard cheaper, huh?) and profit margins remain high. Every year, more students and parents and old people will buy one, probably at the expense of some shitty HP laptop at Best Buy.
This article is monkey-shite click-bait. Here's the real story: some fuckwad editor at BGR ordered Yoni Heisler to write some rain-on-the-parade Apple article just in time for the press-announcement, knowing it will generate a bunch of clicks. And the net gets its undies bunched over how it must be true, 'cause somebody wrote an article! On the Internet! Well, douche my asshole with ginger juice! Next thing you know, they'll be talking about it on Fox and Friends, and if they're talking about it, it's all over the the iPad! Shee-da-Dip-da-Dee... itt. All this does is show how stupid so-called analysts are, as well as the media and the investors who listen to them, going all chicken-little when some gold-mine product starts to level-off a bit. These are the same asshats who wrote the iMac will never sell, and wrote nobody would ever want to buy a phone with a touch screen and no buttons that surfs the internet.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
... or die, Apple. AC because I don't want to retrieve my login info.
So I have 7 ipads. All of them were purchased used except one from work.
My family uses 4 (1 each), my parents have 2, and an ipad 1 sits around unused as it has minimal value at this point due to app compatibility. Most wealthy families I know have multiple ones (one or more for kids, one or more for parents). All lower middle class families I know of have one or more for the family. With cheap apps, its a good value especially used.
I'm considering buying a eighth to run navigation and fish finder for my boat. An used ipad plus the sensor is far cheaper and more powerful than a dedicated boat unit. I also have 3 more specialty tablets that are hardly used as ipad is more powerful. And two Sony Dashs.
Apple hit a great price/value point for these units. And badly misjudged obsolescence -- the batteries last many years, unlike iphones. There aren't any killer apps driving upgrades Consumers don't want bigger screens (though there's some good professional use cases). Or pencils. The tablet category may be the most rapidly matured piece of electronics in history. 5 years from brand new and hot to a completely mature market.
When everyone has an iPad that serves their needs and newer models provide nothing new, why buy a new one? Also, when the two year's phone hardware update doesn't do anything new, eventually some folks will decide a new phone is not necessary, iPhone or Android.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I'd imagine that they'll discontinue support for the iPad 2 in the next major iOS release, so more people will have to start upgrading those tablets then.
The iPhone 4S, iPod touch gen 5, iPad 2 and iPad mini are all potentially on the chopping block. 512MB RAM devices. When devices are cutoff from the next iOS it usually seems to have to do with RAM more than anything else.
I was an early iPad adopter and used it for TONS of stuff. Got a bluetooth keyboard and wrote most of my dissertation on my first iPad. It was a GREAT device then.
Now?
The 9.7" iPad is too big. It's just plain too big, even the Air, which I now have. But I rarely use it, it's become something for the kids to watch Netflix on. Given what else is available now, it's too heavy. Just plain too heavy.
The iPad mini is too small. Not the display necessarily, but because of the aspect ratio, there's no way to pair it with a keyboard that's the same size but also touch-typable. There just isn't enough width there to make it possible.
So there are two iPad lines, and both of them are the wrong size for me.
On top of that, Apple STILL hasn't figured out that devices that are larger than a phone have a different use case. Most consumers are able to do most things without a full-fledged PC any longer IF and ONLY IF the device enables them to work with files and to manage their own storage. Android does this. iOS still doesn't.
So nearly all of my non-work computing now occurs on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8. It's an 8-inch screen, very close to iPad Mini in diagonal size, but because of the aspect ratio, Samsung can pair it with a bluetooth keyboard that remains very small, yet still wide enough to be touch typable at 80+ words per minute. I can use it with a bluetooth mouse when I need to work on fine-control things where fingers aren't appropriate. It's thinner and lighter than the iPad Air AND the iPad Mini. And it has a Micro SD slot and Android so I can (for example) save work attachments from Outlook for Android and open them in various applications, save them, and attach them to a new email to send on to the next person in the chain.
So my 8" Android tablet has become like a new generation of netbook. When separable from its keyboard and mouse, it's able to be used very comfortably as just a feather-light slate/tablet with a touch-centric OS. When with keyboard and mouse, it can substitute in most ways for a fully functional office computer that's smaller than a netbook, yet with reasonable ergonomics. I use it all . the . freaking . time. It is my go-to computing device for most tasks outside of the core of the workday.
iPad's problems are myriad, but they all boil down to Apple not keeping up with an evolving market. The iPad is stale in a variety of easily rectified ways, but Apple won't rectify them. I really don't care about a pencil. I just want one highly portable, lasts-a-day device on which I can do almost everything. My Android tablet is that, and Apple doesn't currently have an offering that even comes close—even though there's no technical reason why they couldn't.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'm leaning towards a situation where the MacBook has no display and is essentially a dock for an iPad. When docked the iPad merely acts as a screen for Mac OS X running on the laptop's CPU. When disconnected the iPad acts as an iPad running iOS. With Safari, iTunes, Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc being document compatible, using iCloud and doing a handoff between Mac OS X and iOS. No need to force the Mac to be iOS'ish or the iPad to be Mac'ish, let them be themselves while working on a common document, showing a webpage, viewing/playing media, etc.
Just because you can convince a large number of people to buy something doesn't mean you can sustain those sales over time. Tablets aren't laptops or desktops. There is a reason I never entered my company into the Tablet/Netbook/Chromebook/ etc market. That is to say it would have been a bad investment as it would for us take too long to get into the market before it ultimately flopped.
Congressional Legislation and Federal rules are progressing so that in 240 days, Apple Inc. iPhones will come under jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Ownership of an iPhone will require registrations and background checks, plus a licensing procedure beyond the Teleco "Happy Happy Joy Joy".
Current owners will not be exempt: if registration and/or background checks signal a red flag, the owner can be arraigned, arrested and jailed, and the iPhone confiscated for later use in a Felony Trial.
Failure to abide the new rules will incur a Felony Crime and the perpetrator a Federal Criminal until proven otherwise.
Ha ha
iPad Pro destroyed Surface in Q415 the highest sales quarter of the year, the holiday sales period.
Apple sold 2 million iPad Pro computers, compared to 1.6 million Surface tablets.
Destroyed?
We might have different definitions of that word. Granted, the iPad Pro outsold Surface, but not by THAT much.
Also, what was the revenue? Is the ASP of the Surface higher or lower than iPad Pro?
> in 2010, Apple's first stab at a tablet
Umm, wasn't the FIRST stab at 1993, with Newton? (Which failed rather badly)
Sure, lots of people will complain, "It wasn't a tablet, it was a PDA!", but both are based on same technology and similar ideas, world has changed in-between and expectations for tablet & technology that can be used with it has changed a lot.
Apple outsells ever single other brands COMBINED, but somehow the "Apple is doomed" crowd come up with the dumbest predictions ever.
Can anyone answer the question as to what the use case for an iPad Pro is?
I have an iPad Mini which I use for watching films on the plane. It's never been overly useful for much else except maybe as a lightweight e-book reader.
If you already own an iPad of some flavor or another, getting an iPad Pro doesn't really make much sense as opposed to simply buying a keyboard cover from Logitech for example.
Once Microsoft released the Surface Pro, I pretty much stopped using the iPad for much of anything other than films and maybe an occasional YouTube video. I only bring it on long haul flights because stripping DRM from iTunes movies takes too long and I keep forgetting to do it the night before, so it delays my exiting of the house by half an hour. I have to strip the DRM since Apple can't make software for a PC or Mac to save their lives and iTunes consumes battery like crazy.
iPad doesn't have a built in stand which means you have to use the fold up case... I do, But it's kinda crap compared to something decent.
If you need a device to be a laptop, well... a laptop is of course the best option. Pen, touch, touch pad and mouse support are the proper combination. Each type of input is suitable for a different work task. Also, a windowed environment is really really nice to have. I like to be able to switch between dozens of Windows quickly.
As for e-books... the Surface Book is awesome for that. It's light and easy to hold and has an amazing screen for reading. The only draw back to the Surface Book is that it's a little easy to get dirty and scuffed up.
So... you can by from Microsoft, Lenevo, etc... proper devices which can operate as tablet or as laptop and can be everything to everyone. Carrying an extra device doesn't make much sense.
So this is where the iPad Pro is supposed to come in. So you're typing a document and you need to move the cursor... so you have to use your clumsy fingers or stop to pickup a pen to move the cursor around. This is insanely inefficient. There's only one window with the possibility of split screen which is kinda clunky. Switching between apps is SLOW... things don't really run in the background either.
Now, iPad runs on Darwin with a different UI than OS X. The CPU/GPU even in my iPad Mini has far more balls than most CPUs and graphics cards I had up until recently. Apple has invested insanely heavily into development of fat binaries or into LLVM IL which means that most modern applications are probably about 99.8% ready to run without even recompiling on ARM if the system libraries are available. In reality, other than the fact that Apple would lose about 80% of their entire Mac Book business if they made the OS X UI available on iPad, they should have simply made it so you could run both user interfaces and switch between modes. Add a keyboard with a touch pad and they would have a pretty good product.
So... as far as I can tell, Apple worked really hard to make a Surface competitor that wouldn't steal business from their Mac Book business... they failed miserably.
In the end... what's the actual market segment for an iPad Pro? Is there a demand for someone to buy what is basically a crippled laptop?
Great products don't need replacing. The iPad works. It does what it needs to do. This means you don't have to keep buying new ones.
People who do upgrade sell theirs which produces market saturation as people who can't afford the new ones buy the old ones.
That is an environmentally sound product as it produces less waste.
Another great product is the Mac. Macs last far longer than Windows PCs and the lifetime cost of ownership is far lower.
Again, Apple does right.
This was a good run, it's just time for a new product.
Technology is advancing so fast the newest stuff is old within years now rather than decades. Fax machines held on for decades and still have limited legal uses, but iPad never had a regulated function to reinforce normal consumer demand. Few tech products will even last 6 years, most not even 3 years.
The first generation iPad was a hit because they were first to market. And the first generation one still holds up well even against the newer Android tablets. My wife has a 1st gen iPad that she still uses every day. Her only complaint was the weight of it so I got her an iPad mini and she loves it. Both of them are built like a tank and the battery life is still amazing even after umpteen charges.
That's why I say it's like a microwave. It does all the basic functions really well and they don't break down. The boundaries of the tablet have been pushed pretty much to the limit. Anything beyond that and you're into laptop territory.
Economics it based on a theory of endless growth. Market saturation is to be combated by market innovation. The problem is there's very little innovation in this market and unlike when the iPad / iPhone was released (the latter to a saturated phone market), there nothing new that Apple is currently bringing to the table.
Lets cut to the chase - the market for tablets will always be smaller than phones. For many people, the phone will do enough, and for others they will have a laptop that the tablet can not completely replace.
But that's not really a problem - tablets are viable as long as they are profitable. They don't have to break sales records. And as they are essentially phones with larger screens and batteries, as long as you are producing phones as well, the marginal cost of developing tablets as well is relatively small.
Ultimately though, we're just doing the wrong thing comparing tablet sales with phone sales, just because they are considered "gadgets". The key difference is the way we purchase them.
So many phones are purchased on contract, with subsidized prices. People aren't faced with a high ticket price, and the contracts are encouraging us to change our phones every 12 - 24 months.
With tablets, we are generally paying that high ticket price, and the performance of the devices and complexity of apps are not increasing quickly enough to drive fast upgrades.
Tablets have a naturally lower sales rate than the devices we are comparing them to, and not making unrealistic sales expectations is not the death knell.
The biggest threat to the iPad may be the success - or lack of - the iPhone 7. Due to the nature of the ecosystems, we're far more likely to own a tablet with an OS that matches our phone, As long as we keep consuming iPhones, the iPad will still take it's share of the tablet market. If people move away from iPhones - maybe because of a possible headphone jack removal - then the tablet sales will likely drift away too.
And my iMac from 2010, and MBP from 2011. Perhaps we've reached a state where the average consumer electronics provides enough power to not necessitate upgrades frequently?
If you have a mobile data enabled tablet - and not just WiFi - then upgrading is beneficial so that you can now do 4G instead of 3G, etc. What's not happening is people thinking "I need faster mobile data to play video, browse the web, etc."
The same with WiFi, when you need to use 802.11z to watch video because there's 100 other WiFi networks around your apartment, you'll be forced to get the new model.
If you want to watch 4K video, you're going to need a newer tablet.
Apple is churning out too many iPad models too soon.
I had an iPad and it was fine when it was just me using it. When my kid started to get old enough to play games on a tablet I found I wanted something multi-user and with parental controls. I eventually went with the Kindle because of said parental controls. I can leave wireless on and he can do streaming of things without being able to drain my bank account. Let him have the iPad with wireless on and within about 60 seconds he had purchased and downloaded a movie (from flailing about more than from doing it on purpose). While you can lock down an iPad to some extent I found it to be a lot more user friendly and flexible when using the Kindle.
So I think besides the issue(s) that people have talked about already with they bought one and it is still good enough, I think that they are also not really starting to think about families using them. They still want you to buy an iPad for everyone if you secure it which isn't very realistic. Even if the device is 'better' if it is missing something that is crucial to most people they are going to move on. It is suffering from good enough syndrome, cost comparisons, a lack of good multi-user functionality and parental controls far behind their competition.
He understood how innovation and market saturation work together. Come out with something new, it sells great for a while. Then you need to come out with something else new, not make incremental changes to a product that's fighting a saturated market. If the new product makes the older product obsolete (e.g. iPhone vs iPod) so much the better.
Tim Cook either doesn't understand this, or he doesn't have the vision to develop something new
The iPad is awesome, and lots of people got one and don't need a new one. And its competitors are numerous - both tablets and pads produced by other companies, and ridiculously over sized phones both qualify as competing products. This all started with the iPhone, and the screen just kept getting bigger. The handheld touch screen device market in general is saturated and is no longer "wide open". Apple needs another Steve Jobs. First it was the Macintosh, then the iPod, iPhone, and iPad......time for apple to get into an unsaturated market. Sure wish someone like apple would make the first move and get on with it and get into holograms.
My first and so far only iPad was a refurbished iPad 2, which I purchased in 2011. We use it to browse the web and shop. Our son uses it to play minecraft. I've finally been thinking about buying a new one and giving it to him, but it works fine for what we do.
That is the problem -- they are rolling out new models but few people see the need to upgrade. They can either race to the bottom and go after the cheap 'disposable' tablet market, where people have to replace them every year because they are physically fragile and poorly made, or they have to come to terms that the 'sustainable' market is much lower than the initial market. The average person isn't going to buy a new iPad every year or even every other year.
A goddam STYLUS (with Wacom-style pressure-sensitivity, tilt and replaceable tips) so that it could actually be used for content creation instead of just consumption!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only 'problem' I ever noticed with iPads is, that they last forever. All of mine have got fat toddler casings, so that they can be gripped without effort and dropped without any harm done, which is also the reason why I don't give a shit how thin they make them.
So I can get a 6.7" iPhone 6S+ that can do everything an iPad can do. why would I need two devices. Now if it ran MacOS, that could run both mac and iOS apps than they might have something. toss in a magic mouse and small wireless keyboard like the surface and bingo, I may buy one. There are still some things that you can only do on a full computer, and it would be nice to have a full computer for those tasks.
You lost me at "pro" is a luddite term. Who, other than you, says so?
I'll need links to these references.
Also isn't the term 'luddite computer' an oxymoron of the most obvious kind?
Every time Steve was with Apple they did well and every time he wasn't they bombed.
Make no mistake boys and girls I do realize they have a farther way to fall this time. But it doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
Steve Jobs was the only one at that outfit who knew how properly run a fanboy cult.
The reason for declining sales is there is simply no good reason to buy a new model. My current iPad has worked fine for years, and until now, Apple has not added any significant feature or capability that would cause me to upgrade. The "Pro" models finally add enough new capabilities, especially the Apple pencil support, for me to buy a new one.
However, the iPad still is insufficient to be a laptop/desktop replacement. This will continue to depress potential new customers who might otherwise consider ditching a PC laptop or desktop for an iPad. Apple STILL doesn't allow access to the file system (stupid, stupid, stupid), and there is still significant difficulty with I/O options. While I'm now willing to buy a new "Pro" iPad (gotta decide which size I want now) after about 4 years with my existing one, it will probably be another 4 or 5 years before I upgrade again - unless Apple drops their persistent stubbornness (file system, I/O) and offers sufficient features to justify another purchase.
Sure, the line won't grow by too much, but the number of people with a use case for iPads (and similar form factors) is still large enough to keep the iPad line alive just fine: schools, highly-mobile users (pilots, road-warriors, train/bus commuters, etc), industrial/manufacturing users, sales-critters using it to sell stuff like cars, small businesses who use them for POS terminals, and average folks who want to fart around on Facebook/Youtube/email, but don't want a full-blown computer-with-keyboard to do it.
Seriously - who was shorting AAPL when they wrote this story? Or was the author just thinking that 'OMG unless it grows by 500% it's gonna die! Aieeeeee!'.
Most likely explanation IMHO is a demand for attention and relevance on the author's part, methinks.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"In what seemed like a blink of an eye, soaring sales began to taper off..."
What? Editor!
As does pretty much everything else they do.
I have a recent iPad, upgraded to the current iOS. A huge number of the installed applications are now broken. They worked fine; Apple "upgraded" iOS; now they crash or variously misbehave. iOS's seriously crippled user and data models aren't exactly helping either.
OS X has broken quite a few things with upgrades as well (and of course, they leave broken stuff behind them all the time.)
Apple also sets up entire paradigms and then breaks them. For instance, initially, Aperture supported cameras. Then one "upgrade", they moved new camera support to the (new) OS, thus leaving users of the current version of Aperture without support for newly added cameras, even though they notionally supported the OS level they were using. The way out of that for me was to move to Adobe's Lightroom, but after paying for Aperture and two subsequent upgrades, I'm not about to forgive Apple. I don't matter to Apple as a paying customer? Okay, then I won't be a paying customer. The used market is fine with me — my cash can go elsewhere than directly into Apple's pockets.
The iPad... I've stopped using my iPad completely — almost all of the apps I found useful (and some that were simply fun) are now broken, and I've stopped upgrading OS X. I've no interest whatsoever in breaking software I've paid good money for. Nothing Apple has offered thus far in newer versions of OS X is even slightly tempting.
In fact, the only thing I can think of at the moment that would get me to upgrade OS X further is OS-level speech recognition without requiring going online. A reliable implementation of that would be a total game changer. Amazon's Echo has made very clear what the advantages of STT are; it has also made very clear what the disadvantages of requiring the cloud and locking down the ecosystem are. Mycroft looks like it may break out of these problems. If so... bye bye Echo.
Pretty sure Apple has convinced me permanently that iPads, iPhones and iWatches are not sane purchases for me to make. I'll allow for the vague possibility that they could come up with something to convince me otherwise — like OS-level STT — but I'm not holding my breath.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
this guy is all over the thread showcasing his Apple boner. i have found it amusing, but it is time to move on.
Lol. Yep, if you yield to your base instincts, your life will go straight down the shitter. Of course, you'll spend years telling yourself that isn't the case, and not realize just how badly you screwed yourself until the divorce comes and you're spending all your effort trying to extract the court system and your ex from deep within your ass.
Birth control: use it or lose... everything.
I just saw an ad from Apple about "live photos"... it stuck me immediately that this is a great way for photos to take up a LOT more room, on devices that don't have expandable RAM.
Coincidence? No intent to clog up devices that much sooner?
Doubtful.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I bought a Retina ipad and I"m happy with it. I have the 64GB model and it seems just fine for now. I guess the pro model offered more space and a USB port? That would be nice but at this time not a deal breaker. How come Apple just does not give the ports that people really want on their tablets and phones for that matter. Here is my list of things that might get me to purchase a new one: a couple of USB ports, an SD port and an HDMI out port so that I can just hook this up to my TV and keep the free charging port. Apple seems to always minimize everything in such a Zen manner when these things would add functionality. Of course they must realize a tablet is something that you just don't upgrade all the time.
Paul E. Bahre
Economics it based on a theory of endless growth.
Only with very basic economics. Market saturation is a step above that. It can also cover contracting markets right now.
I don't read AC A human right
If Apple was serious about the iPad being the thing that would phase out laptops or be the next generation of whatever then they need to drop the price by _a lot_.
And Apple would also have to port Xcode to iOS so that you can make iPad apps on an iPad. This is already possible on Surface (which runs Visual Studio) and Android (which runs AIDE), but the strict W^X policy of iOS makes it impossible on an iPad.
I need a mouse. The iPad Pro is competing in the Hybrid market, as a device that is both a Tablet and a Laptop. Without a mouse it will likely never be a competitor in the hybrid market.
The iPad is very expensive and many who bought them have given them to their kids to use or use them as an eReader/Video watcher or now leave them on their shelves as paper weights.
For an eReader there are plenty of cheaper yet quality devices.
For the kids, the Kindle is a far better experience (by a long ways). Besides being cheaper yet still higher quality than kids need, there is Kindle Free Time, which is unrivaled as a tool to give parents control.
So where does that leave the iPad. The only reason to buy one is to be an Apple fan. Fortunately for Apple, there are many of those. But as an investor, I have to assume that the iPad was first out the gate but not going to win the race.
Yeah, looks just like the much derided Passport. Must be desperate times.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
iPads are great. btw, the iPad pro sucks, it's too heavy, so you can't use it as a reader. It exists in that weird in-between realm. ipad air is already so powerful that you can do all general computer functions on it, get a good keyboard and you have a laptop that suits 99% of users needs. Ipad air is amazing. I use it all the time.