The iPad Pro Finally Looks Like the Computer of the Future. What Did Apple Do to Get Here?

The iPad Finally Stops Looking Like a Toy

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At Apple's iPhone event early this morning, the star was the iPad, which usually gets its own launch a month later, in October.

"The biggest news for iPad since iPad." When Tim Cook held up the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and delivered this line, which could have come straight off Apple's website, you could tell he meant it.

It weighs 720 grams, and its body, less than 7 mm thick, holds a screen bigger than a 13-inch MacBook's. Microsoft and Adobe, long at odds with Apple, came on stage to demonstrate apps built for this big touchscreen. Even the stylus, which Steve Jobs once joked about, was launched as a major accessory.

The iPad is getting harder to sell, and it really does need big news like this:

iPad vs. iPhone sales over time. Both products swing strongly with the seasons, so to show the growth trend, each figure here is the average of the preceding four quarters, aligned to Apple's fiscal quarters.

Personal computers took nearly 30 years to go from birth to saturation. Tablets took just over three.

The iPad, launched in 2010, peaked in the third quarter of 2013, only three years later. It has now declined for five straight quarters.

The iPhone, by contrast, is still selling more every year, eight years after launch. And the Mac has never stopped growing.

Five Years On, the iPad Is Still Looking for a Reason to Exist

When the iPad first came out, many people called it an oversized iPod touch, and that is what it was. The screens differed in size, but you interacted with the two devices in the same way, and apps behaved almost identically on both.

The big screen was, in effect, the iPad's main selling point. Anything an iPad could do, an iPhone could do too. Of the top 100 free iPad apps in Apple's China App Store, 99 have an iPhone version. The one exception is a tablet-management app, Jisu Pingban Guanjia (《急速平板管家》).

The iPhone can do everything the iPad can, but it has plenty of advantages the iPad lacks. It is lighter and easier to carry, and every iPhone is online 24 hours a day, while most iPads sold are Wi-Fi only.

With the larger-screen iPhone 6 and the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, even the iPad's edge in screen size has faded.

In the end, the iPad became a home entertainment device. Most people buy one just to play games, watch videos and browse the web at home. A report from the research firm ExactTarget found that 65% of users pick up their tablet only once a day, while watching TV.

Nor did it loosen the laptop's grip. Without the software, consumers never treated it as a work device.

Of the top 100 paid productivity apps on the Mac, only 30 fall into the entertainment and games categories, and most of those "entertainment" apps are work tools for video and image editing. Of those same top 100 paid Mac productivity apps, only 46 have an iPad version.

It can't be used for work, and at home it does what the iPhone does, so iPad owners have no reason to upgrade. According to a recent report from the research firm Kantar, the most common iPad still in use is the iPad 2, launched in 2011. There are seven times as many of them as of the latest iPad Air 2.

Distribution of iPad models still in use

If the iPad just sits at home for videos, web browsing and simple games, why not keep using the iPad 2?

Apple Planted This Fruit Itself

The toy-like iPad of today is not the personal computer of the future that Apple had in mind. When Steve Jobs sat on a sofa in 2010 to demonstrate the first iPad, browsing the web and reading email came before watching videos and playing games. The iWork office apps were on the tablet from day one.

When the iPad first came out, developers loved it, but the love was unrequited. Apple put all kinds of restrictions on iPad app development: virtual machines were not allowed to run, and apps that did many things struggled to get into the store.

In 2011, Taposé set out to bring dual-screen multitasking to the iPad, but Apple's App Store rejected it again and again, and the app reached consumers only six months after it was finished. And it was one of the lucky ones.

Apple's many restrictions on iPad development naturally made iPad apps converge on iPhone apps. Few iPad apps today have any character of their own; most are just bigger iPhone apps.

To lure productivity apps back to the iPad, Apple has to start over. This morning's event showed what it is doing about it.

Saving the iPad: The Enterprise Market

Since 2014, Apple has made business customers the iPad's next target.

On July 15, 2014, Apple announced a partnership with IBM to enter the enterprise mobility market. IBM would build 100 enterprise app solutions for iOS and provide long-term back-end support. Apple would let IBM sell iOS devices preloaded with these apps, and would provide AppleCare and after-sales support.

On August 12 this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had signed up more than 40 more companies for what it calls the "Mobility Partner Program." They include the accounting software company Xero and the digital wallet company Revel Systems, and Apple will advise them on building their iPad apps.

Less than two weeks ago, Apple announced another partnership, this time with Cisco, to make Cisco's enterprise products work better on iOS devices, for example by helping employees who use iPads get more out of Cisco Spark, Telepresence, WebEx and other products.

Apple makes no secret of its ambition to sell the iPad to businesses. It has already stumbled once in education, and business may be the iPad's last chance. But building solutions one company at a time is absurd. If Apple wants everyone to use the iPad, it has to enlist a far wider range of third-party developers.

Saving the iPad: An Operating System Built for Tablets

iOS 9 is arguably the first system update in which Apple's main goal was adding features to the iPad. Whether it is the improved QuickType keyboard or multitasking, most of the new features work only on the iPad.

QuickType in iOS 9 lets you use the on-screen keyboard as a trackpad to cut, move and paste text. Swiping two fingers across the keyboard also lets you move the cursor quickly, which makes entering and editing text much faster:

QuickType: moving the cursor with two fingers

QuickType: selecting text with two fingers

QuickType: cut, copy and paste

iOS 9 also supports keyboard shortcuts on an external keyboard. Once you connect a keyboard to the iPad, the screen shows the available shortcuts as you work, and the key combinations are the same as on OS X.

Beyond easier input, multitasking and split screen finally give cross-app work something to stand on. You can pull in a second app at any time and use the two side by side:

Opening a second app in split screen on the iPad

Adjusting the split-screen ratio on the iPad

A floating video window that works across the system

Better still, any video on a web page can be popped out into a small window that stays on screen wherever you go in the system. You could, say, watch a video presentation while taking notes in Evernote and looking things up in Chrome.

Doing three things on one screen is surely too much for a mere 9.7-inch iPad.

Saving the iPad: A Bigger Canvas

The new iPad Pro makes it clear that the most important change Apple made to turn the iPad into a work tool was to make the screen bigger.

Because it uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, the iPad Pro has more actual display area than any MacBook except the 15-inch models. When it shows two apps at once, each gets about as much room as a 9.7-inch iPad.

To help with work, Apple has also made an external keyboard and a stylus for the iPad Pro, just as Microsoft did for the Surface Pro. In the live demo, the stylus imitated the feel of a real pen quite well.

With both the stylus and the keyboard, Apple is really improving how you put things into the iPad. A finger may be more intuitive, but for speed and precision it lags far behind dedicated tools.

Saving the iPad: Winning Over the Toolmakers

Executives from three companies came on stage this morning to demonstrate apps for the iPad Pro: Microsoft, Adobe and the medical startup 3D4Medical.

Microsoft Office

At Apple's event yesterday, Microsoft showed an Office suite with some new features that the Windows versions never had.

One is support for rough-sketch gestures with Apple's stylus. Draw a shape by hand in Office for iPad, such as a circle, and the app turns it into a perfect circle; draw an "arrow," and Office recognizes it as a standard flowchart arrow.

Another: you can open two different Office apps side by side, and data flows between them. You can even drag text from Word straight onto a PowerPoint slide.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe brought its most important suite of photography and image-editing software to the iPad Pro.

Like Office, Photoshop on the iPad supports rough-sketch gestures, so hand-drawn geometric shapes snap into clean, standard ones.

Page layout is simpler too: you drag images around the screen with a finger and adjust the fonts. In the live demo, a layout took one minute.

Photoshop Fix is new. It works a bit like the smart retouching in Meitu Xiuxiu, letting you, for example, change how far the corners of someone's mouth turn up.

3D4Medical

Compared with Microsoft's and Adobe's, the app from the startup 3D4Medical serves a narrower niche. It gives doctors high-resolution views of human anatomy that can be displayed in 3D, mainly for medical teaching.

With 3D4Medical, the iPad can also become a teaching tablet for doctors.

For now, though, we know very little about how good a tool the iPad Pro really is.

Office work, for instance, inevitably means switching back and forth among several apps to handle content in different formats, and we don't know how well it copes. Nor do we know how well the new system handles small but important tasks, such as attaching files from several different sources and sending them off.

Still, the Microsoft and Adobe demos show how seriously Apple is courting developers. Microsoft is a longtime rival, and Adobe has been on bad terms with Apple ever since Apple shut out Flash.

New hardware and a new system may put the iPad back at the center of toolmakers' attention, as it was in 2010.

"The iPad is our vision of the future of personal computing," Cook said at the event, describing where the iPad fits. Five years after it went on sale, it is the first time the iPad has looked like the personal computer of the future.