Apple CEO Tim Cook display the new iPad Air 2 at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
At first, a lot of people didn’t get the iPad. “It’s just a really big iPhone,” the voices said when the Apple tablet made its debut. Some even called it a really big iPod Touch.
“The unanswered question is whether we really need a ‘third device’—something to fill the gap between smartphone and laptop,” PCWorld wrote after seeing Steve Jobs unveil the device in January 2010.
But since then, Apple has sold 225 million iPads—not bad for a device that skeptics weren’t sure anyone had a need for in the first place. Over the past several months, however, iPad sales have declined, and that original question as resurfaced: what is the iPad really for? And if Apple doesn’t have a good answer, how can it hope to turn that sales dip around?
If Apple’s live press event on Thursday was meant to assert the iPad’s definitive reason for being, it failed. Work! Education! Photos! Content! Apple executives name-dropped all these things, and more. But the main thing the audience was meant to remember was that the new iPad Air 2 is not just thin, but really, really, really thin. Thin for what, Apple doesn’t really say. “It is incredibly beautiful to hold all day long,” Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller gushed, as if hold-ability was its own justification.
The iPad becomes just one more way to slot into what you’re doing, or want to do, in your Apple-defined universe.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, discuss the features of the new Apple iPad Air 2 during an event at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Marcio Jose Sanchez
Well, maybe it is. One of Apple’s greatest marketing successes is in convincing the world that it doesn’t do anything except by design. If Apple really wanted to pin down the iPad’s purpose—to erase its ambiguity—Apple could do that. By allowing the iPad to hover in a haze of possibility, perhaps Apple is playing to its longer game, a strategy that defines the Apple brand not as a collection of individual devices but the devices as an assortment of gateways to a single Apple world.
The crux of Apple’s broader vision was presented by Apple’s top software exec, Craig Federighi, before the new iPad was announced. Apple’s embrace “Continuity”—the seamless integration of apps and data across all Apple devices—was first made plain when the Mac’s new Yosemite operating system was revealed in June, and was driven home by Federighi’s demo Thursday.
Calls that come in on the iPhone can be answered on the Mac. A Keynote presentation on the iPad can incorporate lists of photos favorited on the iPhone, then be viewed via Apple TV while the slides are controlled by the Apple Watch. “Your devices are aware of each other and allow you to work at any moment with the device that’s right for that time,” Federighi said.
Apple ensures its future by sealing up the cracks through which the temptation to buy a non-Apple device might otherwise flow.
The iPad Air 2 is demonstrated at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
By that logic of Continuity, the importance of any individual device is subordinated to the individual task, which might be best performed using a combination of devices. And these configurations, these workflows, become as myriad as the tasks to be performed. The iPad becomes just one more way to slot into what you’re doing, or want to do, in your Apple-defined universe. Its purpose doesn’t have to be defined ahead of time; its usefulness is just contingent on whatever makes sense at the moment.
Whether this is a good strategy for goosing iPad sales growth is difficult to say, but Continuity points to a more long-term vision in which individual device sales aren’t as important as keeping users locked into the Apple ecosystem. Apple may have the hardware game locked down, but as long as so many digital lives are dependent on a GMail-centered suite of Google services, the danger of fleeing to Android is ever-clear and present. More than selling an extra million iPads, Apple ensures its future by sealing up the cracks through which the temptation to buy a non-Apple device might otherwise flow.
If Apple can secure as much loyalty to its software as it has to its hardware, it doesn’t have to say what the iPad is for, because its purpose becomes self-evident: it’s another useful window into your Apple world. It’s just another screen, and that’s all it needs to be.
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