Monday Note

The iPad started simple, one window at a time, putting it in the “media consumption” category as a result. Over time, such category proved too narrow, the iPad did well in some content creation activities. Can the new 128 GB iPad continue the trend and acquire better workflow capabilities?

Last week, without great fanfare, Apple announced a new 128 GB version of its fourth generation iPad, a configuration popularly known as the “iPad Pro“. The “Pro” monicker isn’t official, but you wouldn’t know that from Apple’s press release:

Companies regularly utilizing large amounts of data such as 3D CAD files, X-rays, film edits, music tracks, project blueprints, training videos and service manuals all benefit from having a greater choice of storage options for iPad. 

Cue the quotes from execs at seriously data storage-intense companies such as AutoCAD; WaveMachine Labs (audio software); and, quirkily, Global Aptitude, a company that makes film analysis software for football teams:

“The bottom line for our customers is winning football games, and iPad running our GamePlan solution unquestionably helps players be as prepared as possible,” said Randall Fusee, Global Apptitude Co-Founder. 

The naysayers grumble: Who needs this much memory on a “media tablet”? As Gizmodo put it:

The new iPad has the same retina display as its brothers, and the same design, and the same guts, with one notable exception: a metric crap-ton of storage. More storage than any decent or sane human being could ever want from a pure tablet…

(Increased storage is…indecent? This reminds me of the lambasting Apple received for putting 1 — one! — megabyte of memory in the 1986 Mac Plus. And we all recall Bill Gates’ assertion that 640 Kbytes ought to be enough for anyone. He now claims that the quote is apocryphal, but I have a different recollection.)

Or maybe this is simply Apple’s attempt to shore up the iPad’s average selling price ($467, down 18% from the year ago quarter), which took a hit following the introduction of the lower-priced iPad mini. (What? Apple is trying to make more money?)

The critics are right to be skeptical, but they’re questioning the wrong part of the equation.

When we compare iPad prices, the Pro is a bargain, at least by Apple standards:

The jump from 16GB to 32GB costs $100. Another doubling to 64GB costs the same $100. And, on February 5th, you’ll get an additional 64GB for yet another mere $100. (By comparison, extra solid state storage on a MacBook costs between $125 and $150 per 64GB.)

We get a bit more clarity when we consider the iPad’s place in Apple’s product line: As sales of the Mac slow down, the iPad Pro represents the future. Look at Dan Frommer’s analysis of 10 years of Mac sales. First, the Mac alone:

This leads Dan to ask if the Mac has peaked. Mac numbers for the most recent quarter  were disappointing. The newer iMacs were announced in October, with delivery dates in November and December for the 21.5″ and 27″ models respectively. But Apple missed the Xmas quarter window by about a million units, which cut revenue by as much as $1.5B and margin by half a billion or so (these are all very rough numbers). We’ll probably never find out how Apple’s well-oiled Supply Chain Management machine managed to strip a gear, but one can’t help wonder who will be exiled to Outer Mongolia Enterprise Sales.

Now consider another of Dan Frommer’s graphs:

This is units, not revenue. Mac and iPad ASPs are a 3 to 1 ratio but, still, this paints a picture of a slow-growth Mac vs. the galloping iPad.

The iPad — and tablets in general — are usurping the Mac/PC space. In the media consumption domain, the war is all but won. But when we take a closer look at the iPad “Pro”, we see that Apple’s tablet is far from realizing its “professional” potential.

This is where the critics have it wrong: Increased storage isn’t “insane”, it’s a necessary element…but it isn’t sufficient.

For example, can I compose this Monday Note on an iPad? Answering in the affirmative would be to commit the Third Lie of Computing: You Can Do It. (The first two are Of Course It’s Compatible and Chief, We’ll be in Golden Master by Monday.)

I do research on the Web and accumulate documents, such as Dan Frommer’s blog post mentioned above. On a PC or Mac, saving a Web page to Evernote for future reference takes a right click (or a two finger tap).

On an iPad, things get complicated. The Share button in Safari gives me two clumsy choices: I can mail the page to my Evernote account, or I can Copy the URL, launch Evernote, paste the URL, compose a title for the note I just created, and perhaps add a few tags.

Once I start writing, I want to look through the research material I’ve compiled. On a Mac, I simply open an Evernote window, side-by-side with my Pages document: select, drag, drop. I take some partial screenshots, annotate graphs (such as the iPad Pro prices above), convert images to the .png format used to put the Monday Note on the Web…

On the iPad, these tasks are complicated and cumbersome.

For starters — and to belabor the obvious — I can’t open multiple windows. iOS uses the “one thing at a time” model. I can’t select/drag/drop, I have to switch from Pages to Evernote or Safari, select and copy a quote, and then switch back to the document and paste.

Adding a hyperlink is even more tortuous and, at times, confusing. I can copy a link from Safari, switch back to Pages, paste…but I want to “slide” the link under a phrase. I consult Help, which suggests that I tap on the link, to no avail. If I want to attach a link to a phrase in my document, I have to hit the Space key after pasting, go to Settings and then enter the text that will “cover” the link — perfectly obvious.

This order of operations is intuitively backwards. On a Mac (or PC), I select the target text and then decide which link to paste under it.

Things get worse for graphics. On the iPad, I can’t take a partial screenshot. I can take a full screenshot by simultaneously pressing the Home and Sleep buttons, or I can tap on a picture in Safari and select Save. In both cases, the screenshot ends up in the Photos app where I can perform some amount of cropping and enhancing, followed by a Copy, then switch back to Pages and Paste into my opus.

Annotations? No known way. Control over the image file format? Same answer. There’s no iPad equivalent to the wonderful Preview app on the Mac. And while I’m at it, if I store a Preview document in iCloud, how do I see it from my iPad?

This gets us into the more general — and “professional” — topic of assembling a trove of parts that can be assembled into a “rich” document, such as a Keynote presentation. On a personal computer, there are plenty of choices. With the iPad, Apple doesn’t provide a solution, there’s no general document repository, no iCloud analog to Dropbox or Microsoft’s Skydrive, both of which are simple to use, quasi-free and, in my experience, quite reliable. (One wonders: Is the absence of a Dropbox-like general documents folder in iCloud a matter of technology or theology?)

Simply throwing storage at the problem is, clearly, not enough to make the iPad a “Pro” device.  But there is good news. Some of it is anecdotal, such as the more sophisticated editing provided by the iPad version of iPhoto. The better news is that iOS is a mature, stable operating system that takes advantage of fast and spacious hardware.

But the best news is that Apple has, finally, some competition when it comes to User Experience. For example, tablets that run Microsoft or Google software let users slide the current window to show portions of another one below, making it easier to select parts of a document and drop them into another. (Come to think of it, the sliding Notifications “drawer” on the iPad and iPhone isn’t too far off.)

This competition might spur Apple to move the already very successful iPad into authentically “Pro” territory.

The more complex the task, the more our beloved 30-year-old personal computer is up to it. But there is now room above the enforced simplicity that made the iPad’s success for UI changes allowing a modicum of real-world “Pro” workflow on iPads.

– JLG@mondaynote.com

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