The iPad is the weirdest product ever. It was never meant or intended to be a laptop replacement but every year it inches towards being so in every way but never quite gets there. It's bigger and "better" than an iPhone but the iPhone still does 99% of what it does.
In ten years they will release an iPad but it's going to be called "MacBook Pro".
Every new iOS feature you see is just like "yeah, but laptops have had this since...ever".
The screen is amazing. The size is great. The speakers are great. The battery life is the best. It's a joy to use. But it just falls short in so many basic areas like customization and keyboard shortcuts. And it's a pain to have to touch the screen for trivial tasks. It's still my favorite device to use though.
For people who primarily consume, it's great. For people who primarily produce, it's terrible. For people in between, you will probably always need a proper OS alongside your iPad.
Totally agree with you.
It seems to me that the iPad is a product that suffers some personality crisis. I read in Steve Jobs bio that he thought each product had a purpose, a “soul”, something it was intended to be and to achieve.
The iPad was released as a device for consumption, as a better alternative to the cheap netbooks, which are basically discontinued now. Apple had the view that netbooks were made primarily for consumption of content, but they were terrible at that due to the very small screens. Instead, Apple decided to make a tablet with a large screen and no keyboard, and sell it at a lower price than its laptops, to compete directly with netbooks. According to Steve Jobs, the iPad was better than a laptop for certain consumption-related tasks. This was the purpose of the iPad.
In 2012, some of you may remember, Tim Cook described the hybrid devices such as Microsoft Surface as toaster-refrigerators, trying to be everything at once and not being good at anything.
Now, under Tim Cook, the iPad became something different than it was. The iPad Pro was released; but how can it be “Pro” if such device is made for consumption. Well, the iPad Pro is not: there is a pen(cil) and a keyboard made for it. It is a device for production and not consumption. Suddenly, the iPad Pro became a hybrid device, more akin to a Surface Pro.
Now all iPads seem to be adding support for the keyboard and the pencil. These two kinds of device had been dismissed by Steve Jobs as poor additions to touch-based devices, but they are still being largely adopted by Apple now.
The iPad is no longer a consumption device, but it is not a laptop either. It is something in between. It still does not replace a laptop, but I am not sure if it really matters at this point.
The iPad became an expensive device, and paying $1,000+ for it with the keyboard and the pencil is not cheaper than buying a good thin and light laptop with a great screen and terrific battery life.
If Apple intends to make it more similar to a laptop, will it have two different lines of laptop? Will we have the Lisa and the Macintosh all over again?