Not at those prices

I think Nick Heer is being much too charitable to Apple when he says that:

So, while I generally agree with Hansmeyer’s suggestions for changes, I have to wonder if these limitations are somehow deliberate, rather than something Apple has yet to change. The touchscreen-oriented interaction model of the iPad necessarily limits its software in some ways, but that does not excuse users’ more egregious workarounds. […] I have to wonder: is this a way of clearly separating the iPad and the Mac, so users do not attempt to treat one as the other? If so, what is Apple’s long-term strategy?

Apple would much rather charge users higher prices for Mac laptops than have everyone switch to iPads, and keeping such a yawning gap between the functionality of iPadOS and macOS is entirely at Apple's discretion. Yes,there will be platitudes about expanding iPadOS to meet the needs of professional users. Perhaps next year's iPadOS will see a more radical gap opening up between how iOS and iPadOS work that addresses some of those needs, but IMHO that's not the way to bet.

Apple's new M1 SoC looks to have plenty of processing power and battery life compared to the Intel models they've started to replace for certain low-end models, but Apple are not even coming close to passing on the cost savings to customers in the form of lower prices. 1 That they might just have several hundred million incentives to stay towards the top end of the market pricing-wise and wait and see what happens next. Sure, Apple could be brave and forge onwards into a future where they use their control of their hardware to show us all new form factors and applications that make use of all that processing power and so on, but they could probably keep to the more conservative path and spend a few years letting their shareholders reap the rewards of greatly improved profit margins on M1-powered systems.

I won't hold my breath waiting for Apple to formally confirm that's the long-term strategy they're going with, not in so many words.


  1. Prices do seem to have this habit of going up when Apple announce new models. Granted they're offering more bang for the buck, and Apple would argue that they want to sell customers the best computers rather than the cheapest, but that's a strategy that works better for Apple when they don't face a serious challenge in the tablet market nowadays. I'd love to see some future low-cost version of the Microsoft Surface Duo prod Apple into radically rethinking what a tablet OS can do and how it can do it, but I'm not optimistic (especially at Surface Duo prices) that'll come to pass.