Apple has taken the bite out of iPads
On Tuesday morning Apple declared financial results for its fourth quarter. The company made truckloads of money. But that happened due to the better-than-expected sales of the iPhone. The other device, supposed to be Apple's brightest start since the day Steve Jobs held it aloft in front of a gasping audience in 2010, once again saw the declining sales.
In fact, this was the third consecutive quarter when the iPad showed declined sale compared to the same quarter last year.
What's going on? The iPad was supposed to be a device that would coax us in giving away the laptops and desktops. But four years after it was unveiled it is already faltering. Worse, the computers, or Macs as Apple likes to call them, are on a rebound. In the fourth quarter, for Apple Macs brought in more revenue than the iPad!
So, the questions again: What's going on?
Two things: One, we overestimated the capabilities of the iPad, mostly because Steve Jobs sold it as a replacement of a laptop and computer and the world believed the hype. And two, Apple probably doesn't know what to do with the iPad.
In the last four years, iPad has barely evolved. Every year Apple has launched a new iPad but except the hardware specifications and the design - which gets slimmer - nothing else changes.
Take for example the two new iPads announced a few days ago. The defining feature of the latest and greatest iPad - the iPad Air 2 - is its thin design. It is incredibly slim at 6.1mm. What else? The camera in the iPad Air 2 is better than what you get in the iPad Air but even though Apple will like us to believe that tablets are great for clicking phones, anyone who cares about taking good photos is going to snap pictures with a camera or a smartphone. And people who don't care about the pixel-level quality of images are not going to be bothered with what kind of image sensor their iPad has.
The iPad Air 2 also uses a faster processor than the one in iPad Air but again Apple hasn't convincingly shown if it is going to make any difference to the iPad experience. There are no video encoding apps on the iPad that can use this extra power. There is no way to process RAW images on the iPad, something that may require a faster processor. There is no way to crunch numbers in a large Excel sheet on the iPad. Yes, the iPad Air 2 is faster than the iPad Air but this in no way significantly adds to the experience.
What about the iPad Mini? The mini version launched by Apple this year is almost exactly the same iPad that was launched last year. The only new part is the fingerprint scanner. Big deal. It is more of a gimmick rather the necessity.
After its introduction in 2010, the iPad sold well because of the novelty factor and because people realised that they could browse Facebook from the comfort of their couch on an iPad. But now people need more from it. At a time when almost everyone who is likely to buy an expensive tablet like the iPad has a smartphone, the iPad needs to offer more than what it currently offers.
Apple needs to evolve the iPad into a machine that can offer people power of a laptop or a computer but with the convenience of a laptop. For that Apple needs to evolve its software. The best thing about Windows, and for that matter Mac, is the flexibility they provide. This flexibility in turn provides users different ways to do things. But the iPad is an inflexible tool. You can't attach a file in an email in the way you want. You can edit a photo only if you are willing to follow a set pattern defined by Apple. The iPad is great at showing videos. But it is not so great when you want to mix a couple of videos together to create a short film on your kid's birthday party.
The iPad needs a special version of iOS that is different from the one running on the iPhone. The tablet needs its own operating system. It needs a keyboard accessory. It needs to support multitasking.
Apple invented (or rather reinvented) the tablet market in 2010. But since then it hasn't done much. The market for the small tablets was created by Google and Samsung with their 7-inch tablets. The notion of multitasking on a tablet has been created by Samsung and Microsoft. The idea that a tablet needs a keyboard accessory to be of really good use is put into practice by Microsoft.
Apple, meanwhile, continues to treat iPad as its biggest iPhone. A lot of people expected that Apple would unveil something unique around the iPad on October 16. That didn't happen. Now the next window of opportunity for Apple is the first quarter of 2015 when it is rumoured to unveil something called iPad Pro. May be it will surprise us again. It's been way too long.