When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPad in 2010, he described the tablet as a product that sat somewhere between the laptop and the smartphone, excelling at tasks like browsing the web, reviewing photos and watching videos.
Five years later, Mr. Jobs’s successor, Timothy D. Cook, took the iPad a step further. Unveiling the iPad Pro, a souped-up tablet that worked with Apple’s keyboard and stylus, he remarked that people would try the product and “conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones.”
(via the New York Times)
I wait for these silly articles every time a new iPad arrives. It marks the passing of time, like the equinox, or a new season of the Simpsons. Comforting, really, to know that some things just keep happening no matter what else goes on in the world.
Never mind that people keep conveniently leaving the word “many” out of that Tim Cook quote to make it sound like he made a bold prediction about all of computing that turned out not to be true. The fact of the matter is, for many people, an iPad is all they need. That doesn’t mean iPad can only win if no one ever needs a PC ever again.
As I wrote two years ago, what Steve Jobs said about iPad in 2010 is as true today as it ever was. At certain specific tasks, iPad is both better than a phone and better than a laptop. There are plenty of use cases, as evidenced by the millions of people using iPads professionally daily, to keep iPad in business for a long time to come.
If you spend a few days working with the new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, and your big gripe is the keyboard, you're missing the point entirely.
