Jason Snell, writing for Macworld, on his theory of why iPad sales are falling:
I think the iPad is a victim of its enthusiastic welcome. For a time, iPad sales grew faster than the iPhone, making people believe that the iPad was going to follow the iPhone into the stratosphere as a world-shaking product. We got caught up in the post-PC hype. The iPhone greased the skids for the iPad and made it an easier sell.
As a result, the iPad reached a huge percentage of its target audience in a very short period of time. And once that audience was exhausted, it rapidly shifted into an upgrade-and-replace product cycle. Imagine a world where the iPad didn’t sell 67 million units in the first couple of years, but found its audience more slowly. We might end up with an iPad market just as large as the one we have today, but with a sales chart that looks much healthier.
Part of the reason for that huge wave of early iPad sales was the success of the iPhone before it. The iPhone showed what was possible, but it did so on a tiny screen. The iPad offered that same experience on a (relatively) gigantic screen. Who wouldn’t want that?
With the iPad configured as a media consumption device, I think sales have stalled because we’ve got a “good enough” solution. Not enough has changed to trigger a massive product replacement cycle.
If enough changes in the iPad experience for the masses to embrace the iPad as a content creation device (as Apple is pushing to do with the iPad Pro), I think that product replacement cycle will reignite.
yeah my iPad is mostly for watching videos and reading comics and books, very few games get played on it anymore, I am finding far more compelling games being released to the Mac via Steam or directly via the publishers, thanks to cross-platform tools like Unity. The iPad Pro does interest me for photo editing and vector graphics/design work.
I’d love to use the Canon EOS Remote app on an iPad Pro to remote control my 6D.
Let’s not forget the original iPad keynote where Jobs put up that slide which pretty much tagged the iPad as a consumption device. All the tech pundits now complaining about iPad not doing more software wise to become more of a productivity device curiously seem to forget about this slide and don’t seem to lay any of the blame on Jobs. Maybe if he was still alive he would have changed course with iPad sooner than Cook did but we’ll never know for sure.
I think for many people, the iPad lives up to Steve’s dire prediction about tablets being used only for web surfing while on the toilet.
I think it fell because it didn’t grow fast enough. iPad should have absorbed the Mac as soon as possible. Apple has 2 PC platforms and they don’t help each other at all. iPad Pro is the sexiest PC they have, and it can’t run any of the pro apps.
I can remember in 2012 or so, Microsoft was saying they were going to put touch on everything, and Apple was saying, no, touch is for phones and tablets, but not PC’s. I can remember thinking Apple was 100% right in this.
But I was wrong and Apple was wrong and — ugh — Microsoft was right. Touch is for everything. Apple should have murdered the mouse ASAP like they murdered Mac OS 9 years ago. They could have had a mouse funeral when they announced iPad Pro Store, an app store for updated Mac apps with iPad interfaces.
Panic is like “how are we going to continue to develop Coda for iOS when it doesn’t make any money?” They should only have had to do a few months work to make an iPad interface for Coda for Mac and it should have deployed onto touch Macs.
Apple redid Logic as Logic X recently (and it is awesome, if a little buggy.) It would have been amazing if it only ran on touch Macs. Imagine a 28 inch iMac with touch and Logic X and you can touch Logic X’s sliders and buttons and knobs. They rebuilt the whole of the Logic interface into a new mouse-based interface in like 2014. I think that was a mistake. They could have left Logic 9 running on the Mac and Logic X was your iPad Pro version.
I really hope they get back on track because I hate the idea that I might have to move to Windows to get Ableton Live running with touch. I hate it so much.
I don’t think it is a problem that an 8 or 10 inch iPad is the iMovie of touch PC’s. I think the problem is that there is no 13, 15, 22, and 28 inch Final Cut of touch PC’s for those of us who need that. Right now it seems like Apple expects me to be using a mouse in 2020 because I happen to need a terabyte of SSD and 32GB of RAM and a huge CPU and a handful of wired ports. That seems crazy to me.
That stinks.
Simon, you were right and you are right – Touch on everything is dumb. I like my 3 monitor MPro tower and I never want to touch the display – unless its the bezel to adjust it. Keyboards and mice are great!
Touch has its place… and the iPad Pro kind of bridges that gap (and it almost has a laptop like CPU). Also,Apple’s AppStore is not good enough – for iOS for “pro” apps and most pro apps are not designed for touch at all … I’m not even sure most of Microsoft Apps are designed for touch. Is Photoshop CSx cloud whatever designed for touch UI in Windows?
What did the rest of the world want? They wanted mobile Flash (yuck), they wanted NFC (ok, maybe they had a point, though so far the implementations are not the best) and they want touch everywhere … yuck.
My WIFI/4G iPad 3 is still pretty good … and great for the occasional movie while traveling and many other things.
Actually I think the design team moving in and stripping the skeuomorphic design is what killed the iPad.
Apple produced a device that people who had no experience with computers could immediately relate to. Then we got the bloody graphic designers moving in to “improve” things.
Great for hipsters but useless for the people that bought the iPad.
I wish that someone at Apple would wake up and see why it is failing.
Hipsters claim Apple was dreadful with their felt and wood stuff. But real people related to that. Flat design? Not so much.
The problem when Jason and others discuss this is that they miss one of the most important points. They get so focused on the iPad sales compared to the previous iPad sales that they start talking about the device as if it is a niche device. They talk about computing in terms of the iPhone and the Mac, saying that people who want to do heavy computing use a Mac, and when they want it to be super portable and light they use an iPhone. They say this is the reason that the iPad sales are declining, people would rather use a Mac or an iPhone.
Well, you could make this case when talking about the iPhone. But how can you possibly make this case when talking about the Mac? Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac and wouldn’t be without it. However, for the general public, I would say that is not the case.
When they point the decline of iPad sales, they point to the long, long line of Mac sales that are going up, even though just barely, for the past 20 years. The big thing that they all miss is that even though iPad sales are declining, the iPad still outsells the Mac by 2:1 or 3:1, depending on the quarter.
If you are selling 5 million new Macs and 16 million new iPads, are people really choosing to use the Mac over the iPad? I don’t think so.
Most iPads out there still work fine and the batteries are still strong.
Three words answer this question.
Why replace it?
In my opinion, that’s a good thing, it just takes a little longer to realize.
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Bauhaus design trends rise and fall in 20-30 year cycles, as each new generation of designers falls in love with the theory, pushes it on their respective publics, and have to be brought back to reality by their publics’ forcibly explaining to them that the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is. Bauhaus design is horrible for ordinary human beings who have no inclination or desire to enroll in an elite architecture or design school.
It was pretty cool controlling my Hero 4 GoPro from my iPhone 6s, though I think my 6s is a better video camera, yet it lacks the small size, better cases, underwater cases and dedicated purpose.
A, “touch PC” is not a PC. Why do some insist on touching the PC screen, that only causes problems… Also Ben Affleck was the bomb in iMovie Pro X!
I have nothing against skeupmorphism, yet I think Apple took it too it too far…. And firing Forstall was a good thing. I’m not saying Ive will fail to take the flat/”bauhause” design too far, though maybe he already failed?
A million tiny cuts is killing the iPad, yet the biggest is Apples failure to support its developers in any meaningful way, since 2012.
I think the iPad is nice, yet pricey – depending…
base iPad is not bad, though I would say the 32GB or 64GB is the true base and you’ll prob need –
LTE/ 4G/ 3G cellular
nice case
second case
screen – anti glare & protector
keyboard
pencile?
and extra charge cable
a portable charger (with high use)
HDMI out adapter
HDMI cable
$1,200 for