“From birth, the iPad has been the strangest, most misunderstood animal in the Apple zoo: a furry, egg-laying, lactating, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed creature, the company’s very own platypus, apparently put on Earth to confuse computer industry naturalists,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for Monday Note.
“Initially, the iPad quenched a thirst created by three decades of sometimes spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to implement a dangerously obvious, preordained idea: a tablet computer. As a result, it grew spectacularly fast – at first,” Gassée writes. “[But, in recent quarters], sales of the iPad — and tablets in general — have continued to decline. Some blame ‘longer replacement cycles’ for this perplexing and persistent trend. Allow me to translate: We use our iPhones all the time and everywhere, much less so our iPads. As a result, new iPads aren’t as compelling as new iPhones and we ‘trade up’ our iPads less frequently.”
“I’ve offered a different explanation. Calling the iPad a Tease, I opined that many of us, yours truly included, were seduced into expecting too much from Steve Jobs’ final hardware act, only to be let down by the product’s reality. We wanted the iPad to be a replacement for our traditional personal computers, and we were disappointed. Many tasks such as the creation of an even moderately complex document are more easily performed on a PC,” Gassée writes. “Enter the iPad Pro.”
“[Apple CEO Tim] Cook’s insistence that his iPad Pro is a replacement for his laptop is presumably sincere, but it’s misguided and unnecessary. The equivocations, justifications, and vague statements about the iPad Pro are easily resolved by a For What/For Whom question, by investigating the Job To Be Done,” Gassée writes. “You work with architects, civil engineers, materials, fixture and appliances suppliers, kitchen and bathroom installers. Your iPad Pro is flat on a table while you sketch a design for the architect to flesh out, you scribble annotations on drawings and budgets, you redraw a layout by superimposing a layer on the original. The iPad Pro does more than replace your laptop.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
Ask yourself, “What does the vast majority use a computer for?” Web browsing, email, some word processing, and games. That’s about it. Really. Of course, iPad does all of that and much, much more. — MacDailyNews Take, June 22, 2012
The bottom line today remains the same as when Steve Jobs laid it out over half a decade (!) ago:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people… I think that we’re embarked on that… You know, people laugh at me because I use the phrase “magical” to describe the iPad. But it’s what I really think. You have a much more direct and intimate relationship with the Internet and media, your apps, your content. It’s like some intermediate thing has been removed and stripped away. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010