I don’t know where I’m going
But I sure know where I’ve been
Hanging on the promises in songs of yesterday
And I’ve made up my mind
I ain’t wasting no more time
Here I go again
— Here I Go Again, Whitesnake
For years, I’ve waited impatiently for Apple to finally do the right thing for the iPad, especially the iPad Pro, and turn this powerful device into the productivity monster it could be. Instead, Apple has chosen to do what Big Tech firms do: It enshittifies the iPad, in this case by limiting the capabilities of iPadOS specifically so that the product family doesn’t compete head-to-head with the Mac.
Why would it do this, you ask? Because Apple is fundamentally a hardware company. And though its almost magically high margins are absolutely a unique strength, its faithful customer base is right up there, too. And those customers have shown an incredible willingness to buy multiple hardware devices. In Apple’s ecosystem, every product is a halo product, leading to further device sales. The iPhone leads to an Apple Watch, AirPods, an iPad, and a Mac.
And, yes, now to Apple software and services as well. But in the most recent quarter, Apple’s hardware devices contributed $98 billion of the company’s $124.3 billion in revenues. That’s 79 percent, barely a one percent difference year-over-year. Apple is hardware. And it’s really good at this business.
Depending on the quarter, the iPad is about the same size of the Mac by revenues, with each experiencing ups and downs based on new product version releases Overall, both are relatively minor contributors–the iPad was about 8.26 percent of Apple’s hardware revenues in the most recent quarter, compared to 9.17 percent for the Mac (7.3 percent/8 percent, respectively, one year ago). But that’s sort of the point. These products are most often just one component of any given customer’s exposure to the Apple ecosystem. We use our iPhones (or whatever phones) all day every day, and more purpose-driven devices like iPads (consumption, mostly) and Macs (productivity, mostly) just don’t demand as much of our time.
📜 To understand the future, one must understand the past
The iPad, of course, has evolved over the years. When Steve Jobs was still alive and leading Apple, he presented the iPad as the future of computing, a replacement for more complicated PCs and Macs, and the beginning of the so-called post-PC era. He was both right and wrong on that count. We do live in the post-PC era, of course, but it is the smartphone that put us there, almost unilaterally.
But that fact wasn’t obvious in 2010, when Jobs introduced the first iPad. He and Apple knew that the iPhone was a hit by that point, one that would continue to grow and grow as the company expanded availability to more carriers and more countries over time. He was coming off a string of hardware hits that also included the iPod, another product family that expanded and grew before cresting with the iPhone-like iPod tou…
