By Dan Moren

May 8, 2024 8:34 AM PT

Does the iPad lineup make sense now? Yes and no

Ever since Steve Jobs’s famous two-by-two grid of Apple devices, Apple aficionados have tried to cram the company’s product lines into neat little boxes.¹

In recent years, the iPad line has seemed exceptionally complex and difficult to delineate. Should you buy an iPad Air or an iPad Pro? What about the multiple low-end iPads? How does the mini fit into the equation?

With this week’s refreshes to the iPad Air and the iPad Pro, it seems as though some clarity might be returning to the tablet lineup…but it may have also introduced some new uncomfortable questions.

At what price iPad?

From a price perspective, Apple’s recent changes come in two extremes: the top and bottom of the lineup. The demise of the ninth-generation iPad and the price cut on the tenth-generation has clearly staked out the low end; on the high end, the iPad Pro has become even more expensive.

Here’s a chart of the available storage configurations. (I’m not including options like nano-texture screens and cellular connectivity.)

Purely looking at price, I’d argue the iPad lineup actually makes much more sense now. The base-level “for most people” iPad is available in small and large capacities with a $150 markup for four times the storage. (Should it probably have 128GB on the low-end? Sure, but when it comes to margins, Apple’s gonna Apple.) Likewise, if a small screen is what you value above all else, the iPad mini remains a product in the lineup.²

Where Apple has de-muddied the lineup, though, is in the mid-range. Previously, once you went higher than the paltry base of 64GB storage on the iPad Air, you quickly got into entry-level iPad Pro territory, then forcing you to make a more complex decision between more capacity and more capability at around the same price point. Rather than the simplicity of a decision based around more storage for more money, customers instead had to weight the ability to store more photos vs. Face ID which…how do you even?

In the new lineup, that’s not really a problem. The base-level iPad Airs now boast an acceptable 128GB of storage and are still priced well below an iPad Pro. You’ve go to go up to the top-tier iPad Airs before you really start competing with base level iPad Pros—which is as it should be.

From a feature standpoint, Apple’s made that delineation clear too. With powerful (and, thus, pricey) features like OLED displays, M4 chips, Face ID, and Thunderbolt, it’s clear that the iPad Pro really is being targeted at those who want the most power that an iPad can deliver.

Back in 2022, when trying to decide between the iPad Air and Pro I ultimately bought an 11-inch iPad Pro with an M1 chip and 128GB of storage for $799; a 256GB iPad Air would have cost only $50 less, and I got a lot for that extra $50. But today, the $999 starting point for the iPad Pro would definitely make me think twice, and I believe I’d probably end up with a cheaper (if less capable) iPad Air.

And you know what? That’s fine. I generally opt for the MacBook Air over the MacBook Pro too, and the iPad Air and Pro lines are now positioned more closely to the differences between the Mac laptop lines.

Though, speaking of which, let’s change gears here.

Putting on (Pro) Airs

The most expensive iPad Pros have always trodden on the toes of low-end Macs, but with these recent revision, that’s even more the case. As Jason wrote the other day, the iPad is no longer the future of computing; instead, it’s more of an alternative to the Mac, for those who want a touch interface with the flexibility to add a keyboard and trackpad.

Still, purely from a price perspective, things do get more confusing now. Consider the comparison between the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air. (All quoted prices are for the base level 13-inch (8-core CPU/8-core GPU) and 15-inch MacBook Air (8-core CPU/10-core GPU) models with 8GB of RAM.)

Of course, some of the iPad Pro models have different amounts of cores and RAM, making this all a bit fraught. Not to mention that if you want a true comparison, you are probably adding at least a $299 Magic Keyboard into the mix.

Look, I get that it’s apples and oranges. People who prefer the iPad are going to get an iPad, and people who prefer the Mac are going to get the Mac. Some people might get both!

But zooming out, there are certain broader assumptions that become clear: the iPad Pro commands a price that is comparable to a Mac laptop, meaning that Apple kind of slots them into the same market.

Which is fine, as far as the hardware goes; the problem remains the software. Is a 13-inch iPad Pro with specs that are equivalent to—and in some cases, better—than a comparably-priced MacBook Air as capable as that MacBook Air? There are trade-offs, which would be perfectly reasonable…if the tradeoffs were really just about whether you want a detachable tablet or the ability to use an Apple Pencil.

But so many of the tradeoffs are about what has been hampered by Apple’s decision to have iPadOS spend years trying to reinvent the wheel. In the iPad’s earliest days, Apple was determined to obfuscate all those computer annoyances like file management and multitasking, only to eventually have to backtrack because it turned out people needed those abilities, annoying as they were.

So an iPad is comparable to a Mac laptop…except where it isn’t.

It’s raining shoes

All of this leaves me with a feeling I know well: of waiting for a shoe to drop. We’re about a month away from WWDC, when Apple will reveal the latest updates to its software platforms, including iPadOS.

Will the company unveil something major that makes us all sit up and think “Aha! This is the missing piece of the iPad puzzle!”? I’d like to say yes, but I worry I’d be Charlie Brown lining up to kick a football, only to end up once again with a head injury explaining why I don’t remember this next year.

Because even if the iPad does get something to deliver on that promise, it’s not as if the Mac is standing still. And I’m forced to ask myself: were Apple’s laptops to some day get touchscreens and Apple Pencil support and perhaps even a detachable screen…would there still be a need for an iPad Pro?

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Jason Snell

May 7, 2024 7:18 PM PT

Some hands-on iPad event impressions

Apple declared Tuesday as the biggest date in iPad history since the launch of the product in 2010. I’m not sure I’d go that far. It was a major event, to be sure, but so was the original iPad Pro and Apple Pencil launch in 2015 and the 2018 launch of the redesigned iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil 2.

But yes, today brought a brand-new iPad Pro and a new iPad Air that continues to be recycled out of the features of previous models, but at a more accessible price. The lack of any updates to the low-end iPad (other than a price drop) and the iPad mini (which desperately needs one) diminish my enthusiasm for Tuesday as the all-time iPad update.

It was a good day, though. Especially for those of us who use and love their iPads. But despite all of it, I’m also left with some of the same feelings of unease that I had back in 2018.

The iPad Air is the new iPad Pro

Don’t get too hung up on the iPad Air’s name. It makes sense in that it forms half of a pair with a more powerful, higher-priced device in the same product line, like MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The difference is that the iPad Air is thicker and heavier than the iPad Pro. What’s lighter than air? On the iPad, Pro. Pro is lighter than air.

But that’s not the point of the iPad Air. It’s meant to bring iPad Pro features down to a cheaper price so more iPad users can benefit from features that used to be cutting-edge. Apple cuts the price and saves by reusing tech from other iPads.

This time around, that’s been taken to an extreme: the 11- and new 13-inch iPad Air are identical in size to the old (2018-2022) iPad Pro models. Apple’s literally re-using those old models, with only some minor feature variations. There’s no Mini-LED HDR display on the 13-inch model as there was on the M1 and M2 versions, nor is there a Face ID sensor; if you want a keyboard, the 2020-era Magic Keyboard will suffice. You can use either the USB-C Apple Pencil or the new Apple Pencil Pro, so that’s a win, and the FaceTime camera has been moved to the horizontal axis.

There are a few other minor cuts here and there, but fundamentally, the iPad Air is even closer now to the old iPad Pro and offers a larger model for the first time. Just as with the MacBook Air, which finally stretched to offer a 15-inch model, now there’s a more affordable 13-inch iPad. It’s a good thing, even if it’s not the most exciting or cutting-edge hardware. (Given the past of iOS software innovations, that might be just fine.)

Even better, Apple has finally decided to embrace simplicity and is calling the larger iPad Air a 13-inch model. Yes, the screen is technically 12.9 inches when measured diagonally, but all of Apple’s laptops are rounded to the nearest inch for simplicity’s sake, and now the iPad has been given the same treatment. 11 and 13, that’s the spirit.

One disappointing note: Apple continues its trend of removing color from its products as they escalate in price. The iPad Air’s colors were subtle before, but they’re vanishingly distinguishable now. On Tuesday, I sat not two feet away from two iPad Airs in blue and purple, and, reader, I could not tell that they were not silver. And while you may be thinking, well, poor Jason’s colorblind, and that’s why he’s saying such hurtful things, I’ll remind you that blue and purple are colors I can see.

For the life of me, I don’t know why Apple hates fun colors. The regular iPad has them.

The M what now?

It was quite a shock when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that the new iPad Pro might ship not with an M3 processor, but with the debut of the M4 processor. The report seemed outlandish, but the more I thought about it, the more it made some sort of crazy sense. And it turns out, Gurman was dead on.

Why the M4 now? It mostly has to do with Apple shifting chip production at TSMC (the company that fabs Apple’s chips) from the first-generation 3nm process to a new, more efficient second-generation 3nm process. There’s a whole backstory about TSMC’s change in 3nm processes that’s not worth getting into here, but suffice it to say that the first-generation process is largely a dead end, and the company is moving to a new set of 3nm processes.

So while Apple was proud of buying out TSMC’s first batch of 3nm processors to build the M3 and A17 Pro chips, it’s time to close the book on those chips—and by the end of next year, that generation will probably be entirely discontinued.

While it’s easy to think of processors as monolithic, every new M-series processor is really a collection of different parts, and they advance at different rates. With the M4, Apple’s moving to a new process a little earlier than one might expect—I doubt the company wants to release a new M-series generation more often than once a year—and the chip itself seems somewhat evolved over the M3.

The M4’s CPU cores are slightly improved over M3, featuring next-generation Machine Learning accelerators that help speed more basic AI tasks that don’t require farming things out to the Neural Engine or the GPUs. Apple has also changed the balance of the CPU cores in the M4, taking the total number to 10 (from eight) by adding two additional efficiency cores. This should boost overall CPU efficiency, though the four performance cores will largely gate peak performance. (And on the lower-end iPad Pro models, Apple’s using binned M4 chips with only three functional performance cores.)

The features Apple touts as being major GPU improvements are actually ones introduced in the M3, which never came to the iPad Pro—so it seems like there are no major changes on the GPU front in the M4 after the major upgrade during the last generation. However, the M4’s display engine has gotten a major upgrade, which was required for the complex Tandem OLED display of the M4 iPad Pro to work properly. (It’s a shining example of how Apple benefits from controlling its own chip design so it can build functionality that enables specific product features.) It remains to be seen if there are any other display-engine enhancements that might affect Macs running on the M4.

Finally, the M4 has powerful AI processing units… just like Apple chips have had for years. It was hard not to listen to Apple on Tuesday and get the sense that the company feels it’s being unfairly marked as “behind” on AI, given that it’s been building its Neural Engine cores into chips since 2017.

The Pro hardware

Adding the M4 is impressive, as is the rest of the iPad Pro hardware package. I want to spend more time with the Ultra Retina XDR displays to really experience how bright and colorful they are in various conditions and with different sample media, but my brief exposure to them was definitely eye-opening. Apple has done a lot of engineering work to build a unique dual-layer OLED system that can produce eye-watering brightness.

Just as impressive is the resulting physical size of both iPad Pro models: They got smaller. In the case of the 13-inch model, a lot smaller—it’s not only the thinnest iPad (or Apple product?!) ever, but perhaps even better, it dropped nearly a quarter of a pound in weight. The new model is only 85 percent of the weight of its predecessor! And the 11-inch model weighs just slightly less than a pound. It’s a huge engineering victory.

I also have to applaud the relocation of the FaceTime camera and Face ID sensor to the horizontal side of the device, as I almost never use the iPad Pro in any orientation but horizontal. The Apple logo on the back still needs to be rotated to match, but I’ll take the win. And thumbs up to Apple for finding a way to make the relocation happen while also retaining the ability to magnetically dock and charge the Apple Pencil at the same location.

Unfortunately, the new iPad Pro suffers from the same tragic lack of color as other Apple products. You can get them in any color you want, as long as they’re silver or the new Space Black, which appears to be a bit darker than the old Space Gray.

The software letdown

Here’s something I wrote in my review of the 2018 iPad Pro:

Saying that the processor in the new iPad Pro can handle anything thrown at it is praise, sure, but it’s also a little bit of an indictment. As users, we need more things to throw at it.

I got those vibes again on Tuesday. Apple has evolved the iPad a lot since 2018, but the product still exposes a remarkable imbalance between the incredibly confident and skillful march forward by the company’s hardware design and processor architecture groups and the erratic advancement and limited functionality of iPadOS.

I will give Apple credit: It worked hard on Tuesday to show off all the use cases that might lead someone to buy an iPad Pro for between $999 (11-inch, base config, no accessories) and $3077 (13-inch, max config, all accessories). There were lots of great Apple Pencil-based demos featuring creative professional apps, of course. I was impressed with the substantive updates planned for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.

There was also a dude on a BART train editing a spreadsheet in Numbers. Which, ooookay….

I like seeing Apple sweat a little in making a case for a product. It’s really doing its best, and if I were someone who primarily performed creative tasks with an Apple Pencil, I’d be all in. As someone who uses a keyboard (and a USB microphone, I suppose) to make a living, I’m looking at $2177 for a mid-range 13-inch model with cellular, an Apple Pencil Pro, and a Magic Keyboard. That’s substantially more than I’d pay for a new MacBook Air, and while I know that I can’t use the MacBook Air as a thin and light touch tablet, I also can’t use my iPad Pro as a travel podcasting unit.

I’m not saying that iPadOS and the iPad platform are bad. They’re not. I write regularly on my iPad Pro and read on it every morning and evening. I wouldn’t travel without it.

What I’m saying is, when it comes to iPad Pro hardware, it feels almost like Apple can do no wrong. On the software side, iPadOS is still rife with limitations that probably don’t matter much if you’re just using it to watch TV in bed or triage a few emails—but matter a lot if you’re trying to go beyond a limited set of features and some specific apps.

I will live in hope that the next version of iPadOS will address some more of these issues. (I have expressed this sentiment every single time a new iPad Pro has been released. It hasn’t helped.)

The accessory situation

Accessories make the iPad. No, really: The iPad’s ability to use things like the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard are what make its Apple’s most ergonomically versatile computing device. It’s the reason I love the iPad.

So let’s cheer the new accessory additions. While I’m not a heavy Apple Pencil user—I only really use it for editing podcasts and the occasional marking up of a PDF—I have huge admiration for the Apple Pencil 2 as the apotheosis of Apple Products. It is a high-tech object that feels and looks like an inert solid block. It’s the most non-technical tech product ever, and yet when you bring it close to an iPad, magic happens.

The new Apple Pencil Pro is a sensible revision of the Pencil 2. (Apple’s moving to a model where iPads will support two Apple Pencils, one on the low end and one on the high end.) If you want to save some money, you can use last year’s USB-C Apple Pencil on these new iPads, but you’ll lose magnetic charging—which is delightful—and some snazzy new features, like a squeeze gesture that brings up a contextual menu, haptic feedback that reacts to the squeeze gesture and other events, and the ability to rotate the pencil to change how brushes function or apply other changes to content.

The new Magic Keyboard is also an improvement. It retains the clever cantilever design but takes advantage of the lighter iPad Pro weight to slide it further back, adding room for a larger trackpad (with haptic click!) and a full row of function keys. Oh, to finally adjust my iPad’s volume and brightness without taking my hands off the keyboard.

The anticipation resumes

I look forward to the new iPads shipping next week. While I continue to view Apple’s iPadOS software strategy with consternation, I am still a heavy iPad user and want the product to keep getting better. On the hardware side, it has certainly taken a big leap forward.

As for the rest, well, you know. Hope springs eternal. There’s always the next WWDC.

By Dan Moren

May 7, 2024 8:19 AM PT

What Apple didn’t mention in its iPad keynote

Apple on Tuesday made some big moves to its iPad lineup, introducing new models of the iPad Air and iPad Pro, as well as a new Magic Keyboard and the Apple Pencil Pro. But Apple’s video was fairly short, clocking in just over half an hour, so as usual, there are some details that it didn’t have space to share. Good news, though: I’ve collected a few of the biggest ones for you!

The ninth-generation iPad is (mostly) dead

Pour one out for the home button: with the tenth-generation iPad’s price drop to $349, it now solidly holds down the low end of the company’s tablet lineup. The ninth-generation model has accordingly shuffled off this mortal coil, though you can, as of this writing, grab an eighth-generation model from Apple’s refurbished store. It’s also still available for education customers, which have whole fleets of older iPads. (And would we be surprised if it found its way to Walmart or Costco at some point soon?)

This standardizes Apple’s iPad design across its lineup, with edge-to-edge screens, USB-C ports, and flat edges, no matter which model you buy—except the mini is now the only model with the front-facing camera in portrait orientation instead of landscape, which is slowly killing me.

Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro updates come to the Mac as well

If you’re a Mac user casting an envious glance at those newly updated Pro apps for the iPad, don’t worry: the Mac versions of the software will be getting many of the same benefits.

Logic Pro for Mac 11 will be available, like Logic Pro for iPad 2, on Monday, May 13, and include the Session Players, Stem Splitter, and ChromaGlow features. It’ll be a free update for existing Logic Pro users or cost $199.99 for new customers.

The Final Cut Pro story is a little more complex. Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8 will appear as a free update for existing users or $299.99 for new customers. It brings new AI-powered features like Enhance Light and Color and Smooth Slo-Mo, custom names for color corrections and video effects, and the ability to search the timeline index and text-based timeline. However, it doesn’t seem as though it gets several of the other features of Final Cut Pro for iPad 2, like the integration with Final Cut Camera or Live Multicam.

Nanotexture will cost you

Unsurprisingly, for those who’ve opted for the glare-reducing nano-texture option on Apple’s standalone displays, the iPad Pro version will cost you. For one, it’s only available on 1TB and 2TB models, meaning a starting price of at least $1599 for the 11-inch model and $1899 for the 13-inch model, but on top of that it’s a $100 premium.

This new nanotexture formulation was built with the iPad in mind, meaning that it’s meant to survive contact with our greasy paws (as well as the Apple Pencil). As its positioning on only high-end iPads implies, it’s really meant for professionals working in environments with heavy glare. The nanotexture cuts glare, but as you’d expect, it also lessens the dramatic blacks of the OLED display.

Smart Folio gets redesigned

If you don’t want to splash out for the pricey new Magic Keyboard, there are also redesigned versions of the Smart Folio for your iPad Air and iPad Pro, which Apple says now “supports multiple viewing angles for greater flexibility.” (Though I’m not sure exactly what that means: it looks pretty much like the previous versions.)

The Air model will come in four colors—charcoal gray, light violet, denim, and sage—while the Pro version is available black, white, and denim¹. 11-inch versions cost $79; the 13-inch model will run you $99.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Jason Snell

May 6, 2024 3:11 PM PT

The iPad Pro is no longer the future, so what’s next?

It’s hard to believe that it was more than five and a half years ago that I flew home from a New York Apple event, my mind spinning with the announcement of a new iPad Pro at a unique Apple event in Brooklyn.

Now all signs point to a new era in the iPad Pro beginning on Tuesday. It’s made me reflective about what’s happened to the iPad since the fall of 2018.

In hindsight, that event was a bit of a foreshock for the arrival of Apple Silicon. During the event, Apple introduced a new iPad Pro processor—clearly a forerunner of the M series that would power Macs in a couple of years—and boasted about how much more powerful it was than almost every PC laptop being sold. It was the first big brag about Apple’s chip-design prowess that went beyond the iPhone, which had been already running circles around Android phones powered by Qualcomm chips.

But that boast also drew the iPad into direct comparisons with PC laptops, and while its sheer hardware power might have defeated most of those laptops, power isn’t everything. It’s what you do with the power. And in many ways, that’s been the story of the iPad Pro since then: This is a device with computer power, but running a phone-adapted operating system that’s not nearly as capable or flexible as macOS. And thanks to the Apple silicon transition, today’s core iPad Pro hardware is almost indistinguishable from the chips that power a MacBook Air.

If this narrative sounds familiar, it’s because despite it coming up in 2018, it’s never really gone away since then. Apple has evolved iPadOS quite a bit since then, adding Stage Manager and a revamped Files app and even introducing versions of its pro apps, Final Cut and Logic.

But over this same span, it’s become clear to me that Apple no longer views the iPad as the future of personal computing. This is to the Mac’s credit: Now that it’s on Apple silicon itself, the Mac’s battery life can rival the iPad, and it can pick up all the new features and apps that come to the iPhone and iPad thanks to a much more aligned base operating system and platform-smoothing features like Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.

So where does that leave the iPad? More specifically, where does it leave the iPad Pro? What’s the role of a professional iPad, when the Mac is now much more capable of doing professional jobs with similar power and at a similar price?

It comes down to physical attributes. The iPad is something a Mac can basically never be, at its core: a touch-driven tablet that’s thin and light, with literally nothing else attached. From that base, the iPad can be whatever a user wants it to be—just a tablet, or a tablet with a pencil, or a tablet with a laptop-style keyboard and trackpad. It can even be docked to an external display and drive multiple windows.

The iPad’s adaptability takes me back, once again, to 2018. That was the event that introduced the Apple Pencil 2, and in some ways generations of iPad hardware are defined more by their accessories than any other characteristic. The Apple Pencil 2 was a solid update on the original, with a magnetic charging system that’s simple and elegant—a far cry from the approach of the original Pencil, with its Lightning port hiding under a little plastic cap.

(However, one feature of the Pencil 2 was a bit of a flop—I never could get the hang of its subtle, accelerometer-based double tap. It seemed to never trigger when I wanted it to, but would accidentally trigger all the time. I’m hopeful that Tuesday will bring another, improved take on letting Pencil users get some more control while still holding the implement in their hand.)

Still, it’s funny to think that perhaps the most defining accessory of this iPad Pro generation didn’t ship until more than a year later: the Magic Keyboard. That keyboard—now with a trackpad, and proper pointer support on iPadOS for the first time!—made the iPad into a tablet that could truly convert into a laptop. Apple’s first true convertible computer didn’t run macOS, but iPadOS.

But again… that was the problem. I’ve been an iPad Pro user since the beginning, and have spent plenty of time trying to coax the platform into fulfilling all the needs as a creative professional. I’ve been successful far more often than not, but that made the failures all the more frustrating. My standard travel backpack is a microcosm of this storyline: After years of trying to make it work with just the iPad Pro, the advent of Apple silicon has made me go back to traveling with a MacBook Air. It’s small enough, powerful enough, and can do literally everything I need—something the iPad Pro just can’t.

So what’s the way forward for the iPad Pro? I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out what I’d do, if I were one of the people inside Apple with the future of the iPad in my hands. There are no easy answers. For the iPad Pro to be a viable product, it needs to justify its higher price—at this point, the cheaper iPad Air can do everything that 2018 iPad Pro could do. So why buy an iPad Pro at all?

Accessories have to be part of the story—this is the iPad we’re talking about, after all. Reports abound that in addition to that upgraded Apple Pencil, there will be a new Magic Keyboard, one that’s more laptop-like. That’s a good start, because it leans into the idea that the iPad is Apple’s convertible device, a tablet that can be a laptop when you need it to be. If that keyboard is sheathed in aluminum and connects to the iPad Pro less awkwardly, it just reinforces that the iPad Pro can be a laptop when you want it to be.

(As an aside, I’m so tired of the people who come out of the woodwork to ask why people who use the iPad as a laptop don’t just buy a Mac. Let me answer the question one more time: I can’t rip the screen off a Mac and use it as a touch tablet. But I can make an iPad into a laptop when I need it to be. Not everyone needs or wants a convertible computer, but it has advantages that the Mac is incapable of matching.)

It’s funny how the Mac keeps coming back into this, isn’t it? There’s a good reason. The Mac is Apple’s do-it-all computing platform, and thanks to the boost from Apple silicon, it’s really doing better than ever. That mid-2010s malaise when it felt like Apple had no clear idea about the Mac’s future, which coincided with the possibility that the iPad would ultimately replace it, is gone.

Instead, the Mac is a key that can unlock the limitations of Apple’s platforms. One of the best features of the Vision Pro is its ability to connect to a Mac and display the Mac’s interface in a large virtual space. The Vision Pro becomes a stronger product because macOS exists, and integrates with visionOS.

This brings me to the issue I’ve been championing for a while now, which I think is the ultimate solution to the problem of the iPad Pro: the Mac. The iPad Pro is already capable of transforming from a tablet into a laptop, when needed. It’s got the same power as a MacBook Air. Apple’s built virtualization and a hypervisor framework into its products.

iPad Pro buyers already value the product for its flexibility. Imagine how much more flexible it would be if it could run macOS, virtualized, when connected to an external keyboard and trackpad. Apple’s first convertible device would be able to becomes a Mac when it needed to—and exit that mode when it doesn’t. Travelers could invest in the iPad Pro and all its accessories—at a price comparable to a MacBook Air, by the way—and know that they’re getting the best of Apple’s tablet experience and its traditional computer experience.

If Apple were to accept that at the top of the iPad product line, the iPad literally transforms into a Mac, that choice would also take a lot of the pressure off of iPadOS. Does Files in iPadOS really need to keep slowly trudging toward life as an ersatz Finder? And more to the point, does anyone who has used Files over the past five and half years really believe it’ll ever get there? And should it even try, or is that stuffing way too much functionality into a much more basic, iPad-like file manager?

The iPad no longer feels like the future of computing, and that’s fine. The Mac is here to stay, something that didn’t seem like a sure thing five and a half years ago. It feels like it’s time for Apple to accept this state of affairs. macOS isn’t just one of Apple’s platforms—it’s a feature, a secret weapon that it can use to make all its other platforms more powerful when they need to be.

I don’t have any idea if Apple really has any intention of letting macOS run on other devices, whether it’s an iPad or a Vision Pro or even an iPhone plugged into an external display. But it seems to me that if there’s any Apple product that is flexible enough to make it work, it’s the iPad Pro.

I still love my iPad Pro. I look forward to Tuesday’s announcements, whatever surprises they might bring.

By Jason Snell

May 3, 2024 3:49 PM PT

Parsing Apple’s quarterly statements, from AI to India

Here are a few assorted thoughts about Apple’s second-quarter 2024 financial results based on the analyst call with executives that followed the release. For a “boring” quarter where Apple revenue was flat and profits surpassed $20 billion, there are still a few tidbits.

Actually It’s Apple Intelligence Ad Infinitum

AI! It’s a thing. Have you heard of it? While Apple has been investing in machine-learning tech, on both the hardware and software side, for many years now, it got caught flatfooted in the burgeoning Large Language Model space and has been trying to play catch-up while re-emphasizing its skills in the broader AI area. In 2024, Apple has cranked the AI hype machine to a higher level, with executives repeatedly hinting at AI announcements to come and press releases making sure to touting AI features wherever even marginally appropriate.

This leads Cook to say this at the very top of his prepared remarks on the analyst call: “We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI. We are making significant investments, and we’re looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon.”

It’s interesting that Cook calls out generative AI, which is basically the sort of stuff that Apple hasn’t spent the last few years rolling out inside its various products. He acknowledges that they’ve been investing in this technology and once again touts that Apple will share things soon. That could be Tuesday, at its video event, but it’s more likely to be at WWDC in June.

“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create,” Cook continued.

Here you can see the shape of Apple’s argument about its relevance in AI. It’s going to compete with its hardware prowess, most notably Apple silicon and the Neural Engine that it’s been iterating for years now. Obviously, software integration is Apple’s bread and butter, but there’s the promise of Services integration, which is an interesting thread. What AI-powered services does Apple have up its sleeve? Or is that just code for farming some AI features out to the cloud? Finally, the focus on privacy seems to clearly indicate that Apple is trying to build a lot of AI features to run on its devices rather than in the cloud—a concept that dovetails nicely with needing powerful hardware to run those features.

As Cook said later, “We believe that we have advantages that set us apart” in generative AI, “and we think that we’re well-positioned.” The proof is in the pudding, of course. We’ll see what Apple has up its sleeve and where it has advantages or disadvantages when compared to its competition.

There was one claim that made me laugh out loud during the call, though. Apple CFO Luca Maestri said, as a part of his prepared remarks, that “customers are loving the incredible AI performance of the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models.” Are they, really? I knew some apps have AI features, but the idea that M3 MacBook Air users are just buzzing over how incredible the AI performance they’re getting is… just seems silly. This is the place where Apple’s product marketing hype machine collides with its investor community hype machine and generates something… not optimal.

One more AI item: I think investors and analysts are a little concerned about this whole AI boom because it can be very expensive. It’s expensive to train models and expensive to build out cloud infrastructure to run those models. Apple using the power of its on-device processors to run models takes care of some of that, but there are still concerns.

This is why Mike Ng of Goldman Sachs asked Maestri if Apple would be expending a larger amount of capital in the coming years due to the AI boom. Maestri’s answer was instructive: “We have a bit of a hybrid model… we have our own data center capacity, and then we use capacity from third parties. It’s a model that has worked well for us historically, and we plan to continue along the same lines going forward.” A lot of iCloud is hosted by Apple today, but it has used Amazon, Microsoft, and Google cloud services too. Maestri says that this will continue, which just makes sense. Apple will build and own what it feels to build and own, and the rest it’ll rent.

The rise of the rest

J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee asked Cook about Apple’s role in India, where it’s growing sales while also adding manufacturing capacity. Tim was happy to provide more color: “In terms of the operational side or supply chain side, we are producing there,” he said. “From a pragmatic point of view, you need to produce there to be competitive, and so, yes, the two things are linked from that point of view, but we have both operational things going on, and we have go-to-market and initiatives going on. We just opened a couple of stores last year…. We’re continuing to expand our channels and also working on the developer ecosystem as well, and we’ve been very pleased that there’s a rapidly growing base of developers there, and so we’re working all of the entire ecosystem from developer to the market to operations, the whole thing, and I could not be more excited and enthusiastic about it.”

It’s a soup-to-nuts answer that isn’t particularly surprising, but it’s nice to see it all laid out all at once. Yes, Apple makes stuff in India. Yes, part of that is that for it to sell products in India, it needs to make them there. But there are other consumer initiatives there, as well as a growing developer base. As Cook put it, “we’re working all of the entire ecosystem”—in other words, manufacturing, consumer sales, and app developers.

More broadly, analyst Richard Kramer of Arete Research asked a really interesting question about when the rest of the developing world will become as important as China or even eclipse it. “You regularly call out all the rapid growth in many other emerging markets,” he said. “So is Apple approaching a point where all those other emerging markets in aggregate might cross over to become larger than your current 70 billion Greater China segments?”

Maestri was delighted with the question, which he said Apple had been looking at internally as well. “Obviously, China is by far the largest emerging market that we have,” he said. “But when we start looking at places like India, like Saudi [Arabia]… Turkey, of course Brazil and Mexico, and Indonesia, the numbers are getting large and we’re very happy because these are markets where our market share is low, the populations are large and growing, and our products are really making a lot of progress in those markets. The level of excitement for the brand is very high.”

Sometimes, it seems like Apple has almost saturated demand for its products, which leads to slower growth (for everything except the Services category, apparently). So, where would growth ever come from? This answer focuses on it: There’s a big portion of the world where Apple’s market share is quite low, but populations are growing and income levels are rising. Apple’s growth story for the next couple of decades may have more to do with India, Brazil, and Indonesia than with Europe or the United States.

Don’t believe the hype (unless it’s from us)

Finally, I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers and Cook in which Rakers asked Cook to explain Apple’s results compared to the data reported by independent research groups that suggested iPhone sales were falling apart in China. Apple’s actual numbers weren’t that bad, and in fact, Apple trumpeted how well the iPhone was going in urban China.

“I can’t address the data points,” Cook said. “I can only address what our results are, and you know, we did accelerate last quarter. And iPhone grew in mainland China, so that’s what the results were. I can’t bridge to numbers we didn’t come up with.”

That’s about as savage a shade-throwing as you’ll get on an Apple analyst call. But to summarize, Rakers asked Cook to respond to third-party estimates on Apple’s sales, and Cook essentially pointed at his legally mandated financial statements and declared them the real numbers.

Defensive? Frustrated? You be the judge. But I’ve frequently seen those “independent estimate” numbers end up being widely off the mark, and I’m sure that people at Apple with inside access to all the data frequently roll their eyes at reports from the outside that get it wrong. I’d like to say he was teaching everyone a lesson about not accepting those numbers as gospel, but I don’t expect that anyone will learn it.

By Jason Snell

May 2, 2024 2:15 PM PT

This is Tim: Complete transcript of Apple’s Q2 2024 analyst call

On Thursday Apple announced its quarterly financial results, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri to spend some quality time with their favorite financial analysts on a scheduled phone call. Here’s our complete transcript:

Continue reading “This is Tim: Complete transcript of Apple’s Q2 2024 analyst call”…

By Jason Snell

May 2, 2024 1:38 PM PT

2024 Q2 Apple Results: $90.8 billion revenue, Services record

Apple announced its financial results for its second fiscal quarter of 2024 on Thursday. The company booked $90.8 billion in revenue (down 4% versus the year-ago quarter) with $23.6 billion in profit. Mac revenue was up 4%, presumably buoyed by the release of the M3 MacBook Air. iPad revenue crashed down to $5.6 billion, a 17% drop from the year-ago quarter and the weakest iPad quarter in four years. iPhone revenue was $46 billion, down 10% versus the year-ago quarter.

Services revenue was the big highlight for Apple this quarter, with a new record $23.9 billion in revenue, up 14% year over year. The Wearables, Home, and Accessories category managed only $7.9 billion in revenue, down 10% versus the year-ago quarter.

We’ve also generated our usual transcript of the executive call with analysts, and then we broke down the numbers on YouTube:

Let’s get to the charts.

Continue reading “2024 Q2 Apple Results: $90.8 billion revenue, Services record”…