Make The iPad Lineup Make Sense Again!
With Apple's most recent iPad announcements, the lineup has become a muddied mess. Here's what I think Apple should do to fix it.
I love iPad. To this day, I believe it is the best device for students. The combination of touch screen, App Store library, Apple Pencil, and keyboard make it the ultimate device for lecture hall note-taking and studying; it was my daily driver during my undergraduate degree, and I used it almost exclusively in my 3rd and 4th year.
However, with Apple’s October 18th iPad announcements, the iPad lineup has become even more of a confusing mess for prospective consumers. Let’s talk about the new iPads, the lineup as a whole, and how to fix it…
The new iPad Pro and iPad
The new 12.9 and 11 inch iPad Pros get an upgrade from the M1 to the M2 chips. They also gain an intriguing new Apple Pencil feature called “hovering”; when you put the pencil within ~1cm of your iPad’s screen, supported apps can now detect this and display hover effects. Similar to the Dynamic Island, I’m still TBD on if this is actually a useful feature; like many recent new software announcements from Apple, it relies on developer buy-in. Apart from that, it was a bit of a snooze of an update. If you are in the market for a new high-end iPad, and can get your hands on last year’s M1 version for a discount, I’d go that route.
The more exciting (and confusing) announcement was the completely redesigned entry level iPad. The entry level iPad finally moves to Apple’s current aesthetic of all-screen/no-home button/flat edge design, and comes in a handful of fun colours. But here is where the confusing decisions begin:
The new iPad moved the front-facing camera to the long (“landscape”) side, which positions the camera correctly when docked to a keyboard — this is exactly how most people who rely on the front-facing iPad cameras want to use them (yay). No more awkward iPad Zoom call angles! But strangely, the above mentioned iPad Pros, don’t get this new camera placement… (ugh)
The new iPad also moves to USB-C (yay), but in one of the most bizarre decisions, uses the 7-year-old Apple Pencil 1 (ugh). This Pencil doesn’t charge on the side of the device magneitically like the Pencil 2 does, so it relies on this elegant dongle-solution:
The new iPad also comes with a brand new Magic Keyboard Folio, and I really like it! It looks a lot thinner than the iPad Pro’s keyboard, appears to have a larger trackpad, a kickstand, and has function keys for doing things like turning up volume, adjusting brightness, etc. But you’d think that this row of function keys is a better fit with the Pro devices and people using them. Also, with its introduction, Apple now has 6 different keyboard options, all with similar, confusing names. I would love to see a reality show where consumers have to go into an Apple store without help, and buy a keyboard that is compatible with their new iPad… #goodluck
Finally, for an “entry level” iPad it is EXPENSIVE! It carries a 25% price increase compared to the entry level iPad it is supposedly replacing. And that doesn’t take into account the $130 or the $329 you’d need to add to get a Pencil and Keyboard. For a device that is supposed to be positioned as entry-level and designed to compete with cheap Chromebook devices in an educational setting, it is a lot for schools to stomach…
The iPad Lineup and How To Fix It:
The iPad lineup and corresponding accessories are a mess; as of this week, it isn’t where anyone (including, I think Apple) would want it to be. If a family relative asked me what iPad they should buy I honestly don’t know my answer… I think I would recommend the new entry level iPad… but only if they don’t intend to use a Pencil. Earlier this year, my answer would have been the iPad Air, but it doesn’t make any sense in the lineup anymore.
I think the iPad is suffering from off-cycle upgrades: Entry Level and Pro in October, Air in March; although the Pro and the Entry Level iPad looked like they were designed without either teams ever talking to each other (no offence, Apple!). Ultimately, this iPad lineup looks like the mess that was the Macintosh lineup in the mid 1990s, before Steve Jobs returned and simplified it using his 2x2 Pro/Consumer, Portable/Desktop matrix. I fully recognize that as companies grow, product lines expand, but the iPad lineup is a convoluted mess, and needs a similar culling to something like this:
iPad Pro: the best of the best. For consumers looking for a true laptop replacement at a price premium. When the iPad Pro was originally announced, this distinction was clear, but over the years, Pro features like Pencil and Keyboard Support, were adopted by the rest of the iPad lineup. The Pro needs to be Pro, and it would make sense to make this distinction before Apple reportedly explores launching a touch friendly macOS for iPad in 2023.
iPad: the iPad for everyone! Apple needs a tier that a store rep can recommend to just about anyone who wanders into the store looking for a new iPad. The current lineup doesn’t have this.
iPad mini: the mini isn’t for me, but it has a niche following for those that prefer it as an e-reader to a Kindle.
Here’s what else I read this week:
🇨🇳 TikTok Parent ByteDance Planned To Use TikTok To Monitor The Physical Location Of Specific American Citizens (Forbes)
🔁 Churn (No Mercy/No Malice by Scott Galloway)
🐦 Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce (The Washington Post)
👋 Apple’s Industrial Design Chief Hankey to Leave Three Years After Ive (Bloomberg)
📥 Republicans sue Google over ‘discriminatory’ spam filtering practices (The Verge)