– Hey, where are you going so fast?
– I don’t know, but I’ll surely get there first.
When talking about the last generations of iPad Pros, something that tech pundits like to point out is their sheer power. Apple excels so much at designing their chips that these iPad Pros are able to outperform most current PCs, even MacBook Pros. In his review, John Gruber brings up the subject almost immediately:
The main appeal of an iPad has always been about the experience of using one. It still is. But put that aside for a moment and consider the new iPad Pro only as a portable computing device. Its performance, both from the CPU and GPU, is simply bananas. It’s nuts. Astounding performance per dollar, astounding performance per watt.
Apple bragged during the iPad Pro introduction that they are faster than 92 percent of notebook PCs sold in the last year. That’s not so funny when you consider that “PCs”, in this formulation, includes MacBooks. iPads were popular and useful when they were much slower than typical notebooks. Now they’re faster than all but the highest-end notebook PCs. They’re just staggeringly impressive, well-balanced computers.
But ever since I started hearing this argument (perhaps since the first generation of iPad Pros), a question that’s been nagging me – a question I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to – is this: All this staggering performance… to do what, exactly?
I know, you are going to quickly point me in the direction of the example Gruber himself makes in his review – using Adobe Lightroom to edit 50-megapixel RAW images from a high-end digital camera. Good example. I’m sure there are a few others regarding digital artists, drawing and painting with an Apple Pencil, etc.
iPad is more than eight years old at this point. I’d be surprised if it couldn’t do such things. The way I see the iPad today is as if it were a car prototype that keeps getting faster and more efficient at every iteration… and has nowhere to run. Or maybe it does, but it’s a test race track, and it is the only car running on it. To prepare for a competition that never comes. The solitude of the peerless.
iPad is probably the only Apple device with a deep-seated identity crisis. Steve Jobs gave it the right starting point in 2010: a device that could fill the gap between smartphones and laptop computers. Then, over time, that gap has progressively narrowed because smartphones have increased their versatility on one front, and laptops have increased their versatility and portability on the other. What could tablets do at that point? Well, most of them have simply withered away. iPad had the opportunity to redefine its category uniquely and demonstrate that tablets could take advantage of their strengths to become something else, something self-sufficient, capable of redefining personal computing. I like to think that this is what Steve Jobs had in mind, eight years ago.
Some people believe that the iPad has delivered on this in spades, but I’m not one of them. Many power iPad users seem to want this device to become more like a Surface. A 2‑in‑1 device. A shape-shifting tablet that can act like a real laptop when needed. They require a versatility that the iPad, in my opinion, cannot provide yet because it still has an operating system that treats it like a big iPhone, most of the time. iPad is this hybrid entity with the hardware capabilities of a traditional computer, and the mind (software) of a smartphone. That’s one part of the identity crisis. The other part is that iPad still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. And on the hardware front, it has definitely grown up now.
iOS, in its current form, is still inadequate for the iPad. To truly shine as a tablet, as a portable powerhouse, iPad needs adequate software. It needs apps that really take advantage of all these unparalleled tech specs and hardware capabilities. But it also needs an operating system that’s more thoughtfully tailored to the iPad’s format and user experience. Sure, iOS has become more iPad-friendly with the last two releases, but it just can’t keep up with the hardware. The iPad should have started to have its iOS branch or flavour years ago — I’d say around the time of the third- or fourth-generation iPad at the latest. Just as it makes sense for the AppleTV to have tvOS and for the Watch to have watchOS, it would make even more sense if the iPad had its custom iOS with controls, behaviours, user interface, that treated it like the powerful tablet that it is.
It’s ridiculous that these new, expensive, iPad Pros, despite having a versatile USB‑C connection, still can’t handle external volumes when plugged in. It’s ridiculous that when you attach a camera or a card reader, the import experience is essentially the same inflexible process as on the first iPad. It’s counterproductive that the operating system still favours first-party applications and not a smoother interoperability among different third-party applications. (Yes, yes, Siri shortcuts… Sorry, not enough.) iPads today are incredible devices with hardware characteristics and specifications that give them unparalleled raw power and flexibility — at least on paper. In practice, hardware is just half of the equation. The importance of software and of an optimised OS mustn’t be overlooked. On Twitter I was making a simple counterexample — that I can still put my first-generation iPad to good use thanks to a good combination of apps, and to a version of iOS (5.1.1) which is so well-tuned to the hardware that makes this iPad more responsive than a third-generation model with four times the RAM, better processor, and iOS 9.3.5.
I think that a good set of apps and a more versatile, more tightly integrated OS with these new iPad Pros should be a given. Instead, we’re still ‘getting there’, while the hardware (design and tech specs) is already beyond there, waiting for the software to catch up. This combination still requires a fair amount of versatility on the user’s part to be effective. This software/hardware gap is especially frustrating when you have iPad Pro configurations that cost more than a traditional, high-end laptop.