Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Harry McCracken at Fast Company talked to Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, Greg Joswiak, and VP of Hardware Engineering John Ternus about the new iPads. I wanted to highlight this because it is a rather defensive interview —not defensive toward Harry— but toward criticism of Apple’s iPad line, in particular the iPad Pro, and AI features.

I wrote about the iPad Event from the perspective of it as a marketing event that was a sales pitch not just for new models, but for the platform. If you didn’t think you needed an iPad Pro before the event, I’m not sure why you’d think you needed one after.

Reviews came in, you can go read any of them, and they’re from veteran iPad reviewers who loved the hardware, and leveled the same critiques.

I didn’t feel compelled to write anything about these reviews. As I disclosed before, I’m not a reviewer, or a serious iPad user with serious things to say, but this executive interview bugged me because it rebuffs serious criticism.

iPad Pros are absolutely not bad products, and no one should feel bad about wanting an iPad Pro, buying one with maxed out specs, or only using 1% of its power. Zero judgment.

Reviewers want the devices to have more capabilities that match their hardware, and their ever increasing costs. Which is what makes the interview strange.

“The fact is that the majority of Mac customers have an iPad, and they use them both,” [Joswiak] says. “And a large proportion of iPad customers have a Mac, or even some of them have [Windows] PCs. You use the tool that makes the most sense for you at that time. They’re two different tools.”

They’re two different tools that use the same kinds of processors, the same storage, and the same RAM. The iPad Pros and MacBook Pros cost about the same if you spec them out equally, but what makes them different is mostly the optional Pencil, optional cellular modem, and singular port.

The iPad Pro doesn’t need to run macOS, but the answer to why an iPad Pro can’t do something a Mac can do, shouldn’t be to carry two kinds of computers with the same M-series chips, with the same RAM, with the same storage, and do different things on each.

I see why it’s financially appealing to have two different hardware lines that don’t cannibalize each others’ sales, but that makes the iPad Pro more niche, in a way.

What really bugged me was what John Ternus said about the source of criticism.

But Ternus also pushes back on the notion that the iPad Pro is less than “pro”—a term, he says, that isn’t defined by the Mac.

“There’s a funny perception thing,” he says. “Maybe it’s Mac people with their notion of what professional is. You saw what the Procreate team has done with Apple Pencil Pro. There is no more professional drawing application in the world than Procreate—I mean, they’re the lifeblood of artists.”

Procreate is an exceptional app for illustration. It absolutely deserves all the praise it gets. I’ve enjoyed using it on my own iPad Pro (when I remember to charge it).

It is also the exception that proves the point those “Mac people” are trying to make. That’s one workflow that Apple thoroughly supports on the iPad because of the Pencil, but there is a lack of flexibility for other workflows that don’t need the Pencil, even things as basic as file operations.

Federico Viticci isn’t a Mac person (should have named the site iPadStories amirite?), so it’s worth reflecting on his thorough critique of the platform.

As I noted before, Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 and Logic Pro for iPad 2 seem impressive on the surface, but they don’t handle things like file management and multitasking well. I’ve yet to see a thorough review of Final Cut Pro for iPad like Vjeran Pavic made last year.

Apple didn’t even edit their whole iPad event on an iPad to eat their own dogfood, or describe where and how they had to use the Mac to compliment the iPad as part of that two-device solution.

No one is asking the iPad to do less. No one is trying to look down on anyone that doesn’t want more. There is no zero-sum game where if Jason Snell, Viticci, etc. get what they’re asking for then people currently happy with their iPads will hate their devices.

Circle the wagons, fellas, someone’s complaining they want a more capable $3k iPad Pro!