The Biggest iPad Upgrade in Eight Years — and It's Still Not the Computer Apple Promised

Unless you're an illustrator.

Sitting through this year's Apple iPad event felt like sitting through the Apple event of three years ago.

The venue was not the same. This year it moved from San Francisco to the 110-year-old opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, ringed by police cars and concrete blocks after a bomb threat shortly before.

The people were not quite the same. This year Jony Ive did not record a video in the little white room explaining Apple's latest manufacturing process; in his place was the voice of Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing chief. Offstage, Walt Mossberg — who wrote a column in 2015 arguing that the iPad could not, after all, replace the computer — has since retired. He spent a few minutes in the demo area and left.

What the audience cared about seemed to have changed too. The warmest applause and cheering this year came not at any feature announcement but at the news that the Mac's aluminum shell is now 100% recyclable.

The main product, the iPad, did not look much like its predecessor either. The giant tablet Tim Cook carried onstage three years ago looked like an ordinary iPad stretched out. This year both iPad Pros are new designs, one 12.9-inch and one 11-inch, with rounded edges that look exactly like a flattened iPhone 5s.

Face ID, 5.9mm thick, the same screen in a body 25% smaller. A staff member in the demo area called it the most changed iPad since the product was born, and that is not an exaggeration.

Apple also used the occasion to wake the MacBook Air, which had been hibernating since 2015: a new screen, new specs, new ports, and a new price.

But what Apple most wanted to say at both events has not changed: the iPad is no longer a toy for the couch. It is the personal computer of the future.

As usual, Cook got to the point 41 minutes in, arguing that the iPad is already the world's biggest personal computer product. His evidence: Apple sold 44.2 million iPads in a year, 7.3 million more than the laptops and tablets built by second-place HP, and roughly 63 times the combined total of Microsoft and Huawei.

To prove the iPad can do anything, an Adobe executive came onstage to introduce software shipping next year, and her colleague used the new Apple Pencil to retouch a photo live.

Autodesk, the company whose software sets the standard for engineering drawings, announced a new AutoCAD viewer. The game studio 2K showed off NBA 2K, a new game with relatively polished graphics, rattling off terms no gamer could be more familiar with: HDR bloom, anti-aliasing.

And of course someone stood at an empty table and demonstrated augmented reality. AR, like price increases, is now a fixture of Apple events.

All of it was fine, except that nearly the same thing had been said, almost one for one, three years ago.

iPad sales fell for the first time in 2014, only four years after it went on sale. Cook tried plenty of things: first the smaller, cheaper iPad mini in 2012, then the light iPad Air. Neither revived interest.

It is not hard to see why. The iPad was a couch computer from the start, and for a couch computer a little extra weight or a slightly dated shape is no problem. Once people buy one, they have little reason to upgrade.

Every disappointing change at Apple today gets blamed on Cook, but the iPad's couch-computer positioning was not his decision.

In 2010, at a different venue, a different Apple CEO announced its arrival — as a third device, sitting between the phone and the laptop.

From a brown leather sofa, Steve Jobs listed its reasons to exist: browse the web, send email, look at photos, watch video, play games, read e-books, buy a movie ticket on the spot. Apps were still scarce then, and reading news, checking social networks and buying tickets all had to be done on sites built for PCs. The tablet was more convenient than the phone.

A few years later everything had changed. Phone screens grew, laptops got lighter, and nearly every internet service redesigned its site and its apps. Internet companies rebuilt their products for people browsing on a phone, rather than waiting for people to visit PC-era websites with a tablet in their arms.

So the iPad Pro arrived in 2015: a very large screen, three apps open at once, the pressure-sensitive Apple Pencil, a keyboard cover. Apple wanted the iPad to become a tool for real work, the personal computer of the touchscreen age. It even brought in Adobe and Microsoft, long-standing enemies, to vouch for the big tablet.

Three years on, Apple's own financial reports show the vision has not come true. iPad sales keep falling.

Since 2012, every iPad launch has drawn less attention than the one before, in the United States and in China alike. By 2017, searches for the word "iPad" had fallen below where they stood before the iPad 2 existed.

Apple's persistence with the iPad is easy to understand. The iPhone, stripped of everything else, was just a 3.5-inch touchscreen computer that the public accepted — and that alone buried Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Palm and a string of other phone giants. If some other company gets everyone to accept working on a 10-inch touchscreen before Apple does, the Mac and the iPad become the next Nokia.

But it now looks as if Apple is not the only one that failed to find the way. Microsoft and Google, both once eager explorers of the touchscreen computer, have largely given up.

Microsoft's Surface update this year barely counts as an update. Google's new giant tablet, the Pixel Slate, is closer to a Chrome browser with a keyboard attached. Everyone else is even less interested: the veteran tech blog Engadget catalogued 105 tablet models in 2014; by 2017 there were 14.

The new iPad Pro has changed a great deal — lighter, smaller, thinner bezels, Face ID that unlocks in any orientation. Hold it and it feels far more high-end than the 2015 model, and the 12.9-inch version does indeed start $200 higher.

Its port is more like a computer's. It uses the same USB-C as the MacBook, and there are plenty of cables to attach a camera, a monitor, even an iPhone that the iPad can charge. The new port also lets the iPad Pro drive a sharper 4K external display — but with no mouse, trackpad or other indirect input, a monitor still feels wrong unless you are playing video, and most apps fill only a 4:3 area of it.

The accessories improved. Double-tapping the new Apple Pencil with a finger swaps tools or calls up other functions, and when you are done it clings to the side of the iPad Pro and charges there. Apple's own keyboard cover now holds two angles, which suits a taller desk, though it is still awkward on your lap.

And there is the routine processor upgrade. On Geekbench scores at least, the new chip makes you suspect Apple will drop Intel and do the job itself sooner or later.

None of these improvements addresses why the last iPad Pro failed to replace the laptop. The iPad still has no full desktop-class browser, and still does not run the specialized tools of most industries.

Plenty of illustration courses now encourage students to work on an iPad, and Adobe has promised the full Photoshop for the iPad next year. But the entire Adobe software family has only 12 million subscribers. By the reckoning of the market research firm Trefis, its potential market is 21 million users — fewer than the iPads Apple sells in two quarters. Adobe coming to the iPad helps Adobe more than it helps the iPad.

iOS has not grown better suited to complicated work since its 2016 changes. The new gestures include swiping along the bottom edge of the screen to switch apps, and swiping up from the bottom edge to return to the home screen — the same interactions as the iPhone X. The iPad already had similar gestures.

People still use the iPad, as the computer beside the couch, a video player, a PDF reader, a sketchpad. The reasons differ from person to person, but for the overwhelming majority it is not a replacement for a computer. More and more of what it does has moved to the phone — and to the Switch. This year, from big-budget titles to indie games, releases have gone to Nintendo before the iPad, because that is where more people are willing to pay $20 to $60 for a game.

You see more and more tablets at airports, banks and restaurants, but those places care even less whether a tablet got 1mm thinner.

This year Apple delivered an iPad that is better in every measurable way, and made no progress on the thing it says it is chasing, the personal computer of the future. Better hardware does not solve the iPad's problem.

Two hours after the event, the iPad Pro had already dropped off the US Twitter trending list, while the comparatively minor new MacBook Air was still on it. But both in China and in the United States, there was news far more gripping than a new gadget.

The announcements in detail:

iPad Pro redesigned: lighter, thinner, and a USB-C port

1. The new iPad Pro is billed as the All New iPad Pro, in two screen sizes: 11-inch and 12.9-inch.

1. The 11-inch starts at $799, the 12.9-inch at $999.

In China the 11-inch 64GB model costs 6,499 yuan and the 12-inch 64GB model 8,099 yuan. It comes in silver and space gray.

1. It unlocks with Face ID, in portrait and in landscape. There is no notch as on the iPhones, and all four bezels are the same width. The screen corners are rounded like the iPhone X's.

2. The bezels are narrower, so the 11-inch is about the same size overall as the old 10.5-inch. The 12.9-inch iPad Pro is 5.9mm thick, and 25% smaller in volume than the model it replaces.

Both use the same "Liquid LCD screen" as the iPhone XR, at 2388×1668, keeping the 264 PPI pixel density.

1. The processor gets its routine upgrade, to the A12X Bionic. It is the high-performance version of the iPhone's A12, with an 8-core CPU and a 7-core GPU, both designed by Apple. Apple says the new iPad Pro beats 92% of portable PCs.

2. The new gestures match the iPhone X as well. Sliding a finger left or right along the bottom switches apps — which does not look much handier than the four-finger swipe you already had.

1. The port becomes USB-C, the same as the MacBook. It works with Mac USB-C accessories and can charge an iPhone through a USB-C to Lightning cable.

2. The battery lasts all day. The new iPad has four speakers. The camera is 12 megapixels.

1. Accessories: the new Apple Pencil is flat-sided and clings to the side of the new iPad Pro, charging wirelessly. A virtual button lets you tap the pencil twice to switch modes.

The new Smart Keyboard Folio also attaches magnetically to the iPad from either direction.

1. Apps: besides the Photoshop Adobe announced earlier, Autodesk has brought AutoCAD to the iPad, though it appears you can only view. No drawing was demonstrated onstage.

The MacBook Air finally gets an upgrade, eight years on

Apple usually saves its most important product for the 41st minute (the clock icon defaults to 9:41), so when Cook opened by talking about the Mac, the origin of Apple's creative work, you knew the Mac was not the day's lead. Still, when the classic manila envelope and the MacBook Air appeared on screen, the applause went on and on. On the US Twitter trending list, #AppleEvent was first and #MacBookAir climbed to second.

The MacBook Air was updated before the iPad at the event.

1. Only a 13.3-inch model, now with a Retina display, the resolution up four times to 2732×1536.

2. Thinner and lighter, keeping the classic wedge.

The shell is still aluminum and the screen is no bigger, but the bezels are narrower and the whole thing is tighter, very much like a MacBook Pro.

Against the old model, the body is 17% smaller in volume. It weighs 1.247 kg, against 1.35 kg before. At its thickest it is 15.6mm, 10% thinner than the old one.

1. It has Touch ID, but not the unloved Touch Bar.

The fingerprint reader sits at the top right of the keyboard, next to the Fn key, and it carries the same in-house T2 chip as the MacBook Pro.

1. Ports are cut to two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) and one 3.5mm headphone jack.

1. It uses an Intel 8th-generation Core i5, with up to 16GB of memory. As on the latest MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, the T2 chip cuts standby power draw and improves security.

2. It uses the third-generation butterfly keyboard, with no mention of the dust problem. The trackpad is 20% larger and adds haptic feedback. The battery still runs 12 hours, as before.

1. It starts at $1,199, with preorders today and shipping on November 7. The previous generation started at $999.

In China the 1.6GHz i5 with 128GB costs 9,499 yuan. The old model stays on sale at its old price of 6,928 yuan. In the end, as the Air's specs caught up with the times, so did its price.

Mac mini: same size, better specs

1. The shape and size have not changed at all — the same aluminum body, the same dimensions and thickness — but it now comes only in space gray.

2. The ports are complete: four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C), HDMI and two USB-A, with 10Gb Ethernet as an option.

3. Intel 8th-generation processors, in 4-core or 6-core Core i7 versions. Performance is five times higher. Storage goes up to 2TB, memory up to 64GB, starting at 8GB.

1. It starts at $799 and goes on sale November 7.

In China the mini starts at 6,499 yuan.

1. Mac minis can be stacked and split complex jobs between them, connected over Ethernet.

No AirPods, no AirPower

The AirPods and the AirPower wireless charging mat that rumors had promised did not appear.

The AirPods have gone three years without an update, and the batteries of the first buyers have worn down. The AirPower mat that Apple promised at last year's iPhone X event would ship this year did not show up either.