More than a decade ago, shortly after the announcement of the iPad, I took to the pages of Macworld – then available as a physical item shipped to your home – to describe it as not just a third device, but a third revolution.
And at the time it was: Apple’s attempt to reimagine the idea of personal computing, a proposition it would return to several times over the next few years, perhaps most aptly articulated in the What’s a computer? ad from 2017.
But in recent years, that future has seemed to be in jeopardy, as the iPad has entered a sort of holding pattern, like the understudy waiting in the wings and never being asked to star. The Mac, which seemed on the cusp of retirement, not only kept going, but actually got a late-career resurgence with the move to Apple silicon. The big breakthrough of the iPad suddenly evaporated.
Last week, Apple took another step toward the idea of the iPad as the modern computing replacement with the long-awaited announcement of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the platform, but is it too little, too late?
Revolution interrupted
In its 13 years of existence, the iPad has evolved from a bold statement about reinventing the personal computer to a device that excels at some, but not all tasks. There remain places where it is superior to the Mac – I prefer to watch streaming video, play games and read social media. But the Mac’s role as a bolt-and-nut machine has gone largely unchallenged. You can absolutely “work” on an iPad, but it depends a lot on what exactly that work entails.
In many ways, Apple seems to have rejected the idea of the iPad as the future of computing. The addition of the Magic Keyboard in 2020 was a significant improvement for the device, but it also meant a concession from Apple that the multitouch interface and on-screen keyboard weren’t always up to the task for the things people wanted to do. After a decade of trying to build on the previous decades of point and click, the company essentially seemed to throw its hands up and say it couldn’t get any better.
The iPad’s past years have been mostly an era of compromise, of slowly adding obsolete features that Apple had tried to exclude in the original iPad: external displays, file managers, and windows. What started out as a glimpse of the future has instead become a remix of the past, and sometimes the remix doesn’t keep up with the original.
Get professional
However, the upcoming releases of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPadOS could pull the iPad out of this slump. Not only because the addition of pro apps represents Apple’s commitment to the platform — though that’s certainly a plus — but also because it opens up new challenges for the company.
Apple
What particularly caught my eye during the announcement was the description of the apps’ “all-new touch interfaces”. In itself, that’s no surprise, as neither app had anything resembling a touch interface before. But taking two apps that are heavy on keyboard shortcuts and cursor use and translate those interactions to touch (while possibly retaining support for the interactions their users are used to) is a difficult problem, and one that Apple wouldn’t take lightly. . It’s a tacit reversal of its reliance on the legacy keyboard and trackpad, indicating that perhaps the company indeed believes touch is a valid option for even the most complex of tasks.
The real question hanging over these announcements is whether the company’s other big pro app, Xcode, will also make the leap. Writing iPad apps to date on the iPad is limited to Swift Playgrounds, which lacks the power and full capabilities of Xcode. But giving iPad users the same tools as Mac users — and, more to the point, letting iPadOS become self-sufficient — would be a big step in the evolution of the platform.
Future Imperfection
All this makes me wonder where exactly the iPad will go from here. The idea of a lightweight, touch-first tablet remains a good one, and essentially the iPad’s challenges were never about hardware. The consensus in the community is that it’s the software that’s failing.
The thrust of Apple’s argument for the iPad seems to have shifted more recently to the idea of versatility. It can work with a keyboard and trackpad in a laptop configuration, or just stand alone as a screen. The apps can work in full screen or multitask with windows. In short, it meets what users want from it.
But the changes Apple is making, including the touch interface version of its pro apps, don’t have to be purely about the iPad like a future. Perhaps the iPad wasn’t a third revolution, but a springboard to a world where Apple’s main computing platform can do what an iPad can And what a Mac can do. Many have dismissed the idea of merging the two platforms, but perhaps there is an idea greater than the sum of its parts.
The idea of a device that acts like a Mac while plugged into a keyboard and an iPad while unplugged might seem like Frankstein’s unholy toaster fridge to some, but after 13 years of iPad I’d say people are pretty comfortable using to go back and forth between two (or more) separate devices with different interfaces. Why not find a way to consolidate them? In a world where we’ve started talking about smartphones that fold out into tablets, a tablet that can turn into a laptop hardly sounds far-fetched. Ultimately, what we all look for is the right tool for the job. Sometimes it’s a screwdriver, sometimes it’s a wrench, and sometimes it’s an all-in-one multi-tool that fits in your pocket.
