I don’t understand why Apple called the iPad Pro the iPad Pro, well maybe I do. They really want to pitch their devices to ‘professionals’, people who would not traditionally use an iPad or maybe even an Apple device. This doesn’t make much sense because the iPhone really is ubiquitous amongst professionals. The iPhone and Good For Enterprise ate BlackBerry’s lunch - BlackBerry has now bought Good Technologies in an effort to reclaim some relevance in the industry (too little, too late).
Professionals were never after a bigger iPad, it wasn’t the 9.7” formfactor that stopped anyone buying it. It wasn’t even the lack of a keyboard. There are so many aftermarket keyboards to choose from, and a lot of them are very good - one of the best being made by Microsoft.
There are two things that would stop a professional buying an iPad, compatibility with business applications (both corporate like email and line of business like that giant spreadsheet used to run the company) and supportability.
Looking at application support, this is almost a non-issue now. The Apple Mail application on iPads is quite good, and so much better than Outlook (with a finger) or the mail client built in to Windows 10 it isn’t funny. But it should be, it’s been through many revisions and come a long way from where it used to be.
The next part of this is compatibility with that giant spreadsheet your company uses to run everything. It has been around for years, has 23 macros and the original author left the organisation 5 years ago, but that spreadsheet is critical, and if anything happens to it everyone is hosed. Microsoft almost banks on this as the reason you need ‘real’ Excel, and ‘real’ Windows. But over the last 5 years these business critical spreadsheets have been going away. That isn’t to say there aren’t any anymore, but as iPads, iPhones, Android all become more popular dedicated applications built natively for those interfaces have been taking over the spreadsheet.
Unlike the spreadsheet these apps might not do absolutely everything, but there are more than one of them and they are all targeted to do one thing and do it really well. This is one of the new paradigms of User Experience, don’t build a monolithic app that does everything, that links to a million functions that make it hard to update. Just build out the function you want it to perform, but make it do that thing really well. This paradigm is also being shifted back to the desktop.
Originally posted by Eric Bourke - I’d link to his blog, but the domain has gone. This sums up every application ever, perfectly.
Supportability. This is an interesting point. Your company’s IT section would really like a tablet they can control and have confidence that company data isn’t going to go wandering. They’d like to integrate it with their current IT systems, and maybe even have a pool of devices that multiple users can login to. iOS desperately needs better multi-user support, but until that happens there are a number of companies that are able to help out with that.
Where Apple has been working to court professional users is with the extra APIs that have been added to iOS over time for Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) or Mobile Device Management (MDM). These have allowed IT sections to manage iOS devices like Windows devices on the network. Many even allow a user to “login” to the device (it isn’t a user on iOS, but the EMM platform authenticates the user, and pushes down all their specific applications). These tools also allow the distribution of in-house developed applications that never need to go anywhere near the App Store. Meaning they aren’t cleared by Apple. I imagine somewhere out there is a legit version of Chrome for iOS with Google’s own rendering engine running on a managed iPad. I also assume Microsoft have Edge running on an iPad, it probably crashes almost as much as it does on Windows 10. Adobe probably have a full version of PhotoShop (or maybe not). The EMM and MDM companies are what killed BlackBerry. The usability of iOS combined with the security and added flexibility of the MDM was a much better product.
So, what about the Surface? Doesn’t that make the iPad redundant? No. The Surface line of products remains an abomination. Too big to use one handed, or comfortably while standing, too unwieldy to use on a lap (though this has improved, I still can’t use it like a laptop), and Windows 10 is still bad. It isn’t Windows 8 bad, or Windows Vista bad, but it is bad.
Microsoft’s idea of (I can’t remember what they are called now, but I think this is right) Universal Apps isn’t the best idea they have had. It isn’t the worst idea, but I don’t think it is what they intended. The idea of writing an app once and having it run anywhere has been around for decades, just ask Oracle about Java. Microsoft took this idea, combined it with the web and said ‘Ta-Dah!’ but this is the exact same idea Apple had when they first released the iPhone with no App Store, and no way to even write a native app for the iOS platform.
Universal Applications are just scaled up web pages that can render on both a phone and a tablet, something that can easily be achieved through appropriate use of HTML5 and responsive web design. Universal Apps that are written once and can run anywhere aren’t desktops apps that run on a phone, they are phone apps that run on a desktop. This, combined with some serious limitations in the Microsoft Store and in Windows itself mean an awful lot of Universal Apps are pure garbage.
Skype when installed through the Microsoft Store isn’t isn’t actually Skype, it is called ‘Get Skype’ because the app in the store is just an installer that goes and gets the ‘real’ Skype. The first time I saw this I assumed it was spam, because Skype is a Microsoft product, and surely they’d just have Skype in the Microsoft Store, but they don’t.
Dropbox for Windows 8 (when it was launched) installed from the Microsoft Store was terrible. It was a completely different client to the Dropbox Windows client that actually downloaded your files locally for easy access and sync, it was just a portal to the web. It was the mobile client scaled to a tablet with an interface that was better for fingers, but sucked at being usable without an Internet connection. But, because this is real Windows you can simply go to the web and download the proper Dropbox client, until Microsoft close that loophole, like Apple are trying to do in OS X.
One of the benefits of the Surface is that it is ‘real’ Windows, with ‘real’ apps. But those apps aren’t in the Microsoft Store. Any advantage of ‘real’ Windows goes away as soon as the apps written for it are just web pages. Microsoft will argue that Lightroom on a Surface Pro is much more powerful than Lightroom on an iPad. They aren’t wrong. But the simple fact is that doesn’t matter anymore. The best Lightroom experience on a device that size and form factor that can be used with a touch interface is Lightroom for iOS or Android. The limitations (which are ever shrinking) are more than made up for in performance and usability.
Does this mean the Surface is a terrible device? Not really, it is a perfectly capable laptop that can’t be used on a lap.
So why does Apple call the iPad Pro the iPad Pro? The iPad is a professional device if it is used by a professional. There are no real professional capabilities in the iPad Pro not found in other iPads. The reason Apple called it the iPad Pro was because they couldn’t call it what it was, iPad Large, to go with the iPad Regular and iPad Mini.
What professional capabilities should the iPad Pro have, over the standard devices? Multi-user support, the ability to install apps outside the App Store, and better support for the native filesystem on the device. That last one potentially breaks a lot of what makes an iPad an iPad, but it would be wonderful.