Can Apple Reinvent the Personal Computer Again? It Now Depends on This Man

We Talked With Phil Schiller for a While

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The iPad Pro has been on sale for two months. When we asked Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, whether he was happy with sales, we got the answer we expected, more or less: very happy, but he couldn't share numbers (wait for next week's earnings report).

For an iPad Pro that starts at 5,888 yuan and aims to replace the laptop, sales are not yet the most pressing question.

"The iPad is Apple's clearest vision of the future of personal computing. A simple piece of glass that supports multi-touch and can instantly become anything you want."

At the September launch event, Tim Cook split the iPad Pro into two parts: the hardware, that piece of glass; and the apps, which turn the glass into anything you want in an instant.

The glass is impeccable. Apple has squeezed a huge 12.9-inch screen into a body 6.9 mm thick that weighs 713 grams, less than four big iPhones. Some reviews still complain that the new iPad has no SD card slot or USB port, but Apple has long been used to such complaints; it heard them each time it cut the floppy drive, the optical drive and the Ethernet port.

Hardware has never been Apple's worry. The "vision of future computing" has not come true yet because the iPad's software cannot yet become anything you want.

After the iPad Pro went on sale, QDaily's Curiosity Lab column asked seven people from different professions to try working with nothing but an iPad Pro for a week. The result: the iPad Pro really is the best iPad for office work, but it still lacks some of the specialized apps that different professions need.

And that was after we screened the testers. Programmers and UI designers, the core of the Mac faithful, were left out because there were simply no usable tools for them. Every day some apps update with a note saying "now supports iPad Pro," but the shortage of productivity apps remains.

Now the job of fixing the app problem falls entirely to Phil Schiller.

Schiller at the launch event

On December 17, 2015, Apple announced a reshuffle of its senior leadership, and Phil Schiller took charge of everything to do with the App Stores.

"From the day the App Store launched, Eddy (Eddy Cue) and I ran it, and in fact we still need to work together now. I'm taking on more responsibility because (as more kinds of hardware come out) the App Store has more opportunities, and I hope it can bring some new ideas to other parts of the company," Schiller said, describing his current role in an interview with QDaily at the Four Seasons Hotel Pudong at noon today.

Before the change, Schiller was responsible for developer relations and App Store review, while Eddy Cue managed the App Store's infrastructure, which is built on the iTunes platform.

Perhaps because of the camera angles, Schiller looked thinner in person than in photos from the launch event. Since Steve Jobs, almost everyone in Apple's top management has had a signature outfit. Schiller wore his usual faded jeans, a bright shirt (green this time) and a gray blazer. In a corner of the suite, every iPhone and iPad model on sale, plus the small MacBook in every color, was lined up on a table like a miniature Apple Store.

This is Schiller's first trip to China since taking over the App Store. His public schedule yesterday: a visit to the office of Liulishuo, an English-learning app; a chat with students at the Tongji University School of Software and its iOS developer club; and a stop at Markor Home to see the enterprise software Apple built with IBM.

The work with IBM to fill the iPad's gap in business software began before the iPad Pro was released. On launch day, executives from Microsoft and Adobe took the stage to praise Apple's new product and demonstrate software each had designed for the 12.9-inch screen. These partnerships clearly took effort. Microsoft's Surface tablet competes with the iPad, and its executives had publicly mocked the iPad Pro as a mere "companion" device; Adobe had fallen out with Apple over the death of Flash.

Schiller knows Adobe well; he worked there before returning to Apple in 1997. That was the year Jobs came back to Apple, and he brought back Schiller, who had worked at Apple in its early years, to run marketing. From then on, at nearly every product launch, Schiller joined Jobs on stage to present new products.

Like Jony Ive, who leads design, Schiller is one of the very few members of Jobs's inner circle of executives from the 2000s who are still at Apple. Because he often presented products on stage, and hosted launch events himself during the transition to Cook, Schiller was often compared with Jobs in earlier years.

The two men's lives had almost nothing in common. Jobs had no interest in sports; Schiller loves hockey and has even emailed Apple blogger John Gruber to talk about their favorite teams. Jobs never flaunted his wealth; Schiller collects expensive sports cars.

What they shared was a business outlook. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, Schiller's views matched Jobs's so closely that people inside the company called him "Mini-Me."

Schiller had given fewer than five public interviews in the previous ten years; today he gave four in a single day. In our interview, which lasted under 30 minutes, he chose his words carefully. Still, he made no effort to hide what he thought of his competitors.

Asked about competition from Chinese Android makers, he dismissed them as imitators: "What's interesting is that over the past few years every manufacturer has wanted to follow Apple, every one has wanted to make something like the iPhone, and none of them has managed it. The only real iPhone is the iPhone."

The iPhone indeed has little to fear from cheap Chinese rivals: in the nine years since its launch, it has sold more every year than the year before, and its prices have not come down.

The iPad's picture is less rosy. Over the past two years, iPad sales have fallen quarter after quarter:

Note: The quarterly sales figures in the chart are rolling figures (the average of the past four quarters). This method removes the effect of the Christmas shopping season and shows the growth trend. A few years ago Cook used the same method on stage to show the iPad's growth trend

The iPad is not selling less because of competition from Android or Surface tablets. Every third-party figure shows that Android tablets are also struggling to grow, and that people rarely use them after buying them. The Surface, meanwhile, is mostly used as a laptop; otherwise the Windows Store would not have so few tablet apps, left so long without updates.

The iPad is not selling because most people keep it at home for browsing the web and watching videos. For that, the 2011 iPad 2 is more than enough. By mid-2015, more than 90% of iPad users were still on a 2013 model or older:

iPad usage by model

Ever-bigger iPhones and ever-lighter MacBooks have left the iPad in an awkward spot.

With the iPad Pro, Apple is staking its hopes of reviving the iPad business on productivity tools. Schiller has often talked about how Apple's products compete with one another:

"(Competition) isn't dangerous; it's almost by design. You have to make different products compete with each other for room to exist, for time in use. The iPhone gets so good that you don't know why you need an iPad; the iPad gets so good that you don't know why you need a laptop; the laptop gets so good that you don't know why you need a desktop. Every product's job is to compete with the others."

The iPad's future is settled: it will compete with the Mac, with a different way of control. The iPad Pro's interface relies entirely on fingers touching the screen; the keyboard and the pen are only accessories. That is why Apple does not ship these accessories as standard, why iOS still refuses to support a trackpad, and why it has not been optimized for the Apple Pencil.

The personal computer of the future that Cook talks about is one you control by touching the screen directly with your fingers, no longer relying on indirect tools such as a mouse or trackpad.

A bigger screen needs software designed for it, and Apple cannot count on consumer apps. The iPad is not at the user's side 24/7 the way the iPhone is, and social, e-commerce and news apps will surely keep adapting to the small screen people carry everywhere, not the other way around.

Still, there are plenty of places where a big screen helps. Next to an iPhone that tops out at 5.5 inches, a large iPad is much closer to a teacher's lesson plan, the mixer in front of a DJ, the drawing board on a designer's desk, the cash register facing a shop clerk, the thick flight manual on a plane...

For checking WeChat or reading the news, a small screen does fine. But for complex work, only a big screen is efficient enough, even if it may never have as many users as the smartphone.

The professional software makers arriving with the iPad Pro are so far mostly giants like Microsoft and Adobe. Their business models are mature, but it is hard to expect them to innovate in how software works or to find new uses for this big screen. If the history of the iPhone App Store is any guide, that innovation must come from small and mid-sized developers.

But today's App Store does not suit small and mid-sized developers of enterprise and professional tools particularly well. Two developers speak for many.

Emanuel Sa, developer of the Mac design tool Sketch, said publicly: "The lack of trials drives iOS app prices extremely low. We will not develop for the iPad Pro if we can't expect to earn back the investment."

Bret Taylor, founder of the document collaboration tool Quip and former CTO of Facebook, said: "(Worse than the lack of trials) every enterprise software company lives on subscriptions and team purchases. iOS payments assume that everyone pays their own bills."

Schiller believes the second problem does not exist, because the App Store also offers enterprise accounts that can do the same thing. But enterprise accounts are far more cumbersome than the way business tools are sold online today.

As for trials, he told QDaily: "Trials need very careful engineering. If we offered trials widely, how would we make sure users don't download other apps, try each one and then delete it? We are looking for solutions, so that we can offer a trial feature all developers can accept."

The App Store has 1.4 million apps, and Schiller believes only a small share depend on trials. But that small group of developers is exactly whose help Apple needs now, to make the iPad truly "something that can instantly become anything you want."

Of course, only Schiller knows what changes he will make next. Unless they mean to, Apple's executives never reveal anything in advance.

Schiller visiting the Liulishuo office yesterday

Schiller himself, though, genuinely loves apps from small and mid-sized developers. During a break in the interview, he put on his glasses and looked down at the Apple Watch on his left wrist. A logo appeared on the screen, a white triangle on a blue background: clearly Spark, the email client launched last year.

Counting Spark, Schiller has three email clients on his iPhone. He is not entirely happy with Spark's design; he complained that after you read an email, the order of the inbox changes in a way that isn't intuitive.

He also has three Twitter clients: Twitter, Tweetbot and Twitterrific. Besides his verified official account, whose avatar is a still from the cartoon Marine Boy, he has several alternate accounts. An active Twitter user like him probably does need them, since his main account draws so much attention: after Tony Fadell, the vice president in charge of the first iPhone's hardware, joined Google, people soon noticed that Schiller had quietly unfollowed his former colleague.

Today, developers of niche professional tools like Spark hold the iPad's future in their hands. That may be a first for Apple since it changed its name and, thanks to the iPhone, became a consumer brand. Winning these developers over is now Schiller's job.

"One thing I can say about Apple is that it's always changing. Ever since I came back to Apple in 1997, change has been part of survival," Schiller said near the end of the interview, reflecting on his 19 years at the company.

Now Apple can change a little more.

Cover image from The Next Web