MacBook Neo isn't innovation: It's Apple correcting a story it pushed for years

Around that time my hackathon kit was a bottom-of-the-line Android tablet with a $5 plastic clip and a cheap bluetooth keyboard and cheap mouse and with $75 of client hardware I would connect to a $2 hour machine in AWS and have a machine that was so sleek it made macbooks look clunky in comparison and also vastly more powerful than the bulky desktop replacement laptops and the gaudy gaming laptops -- it turned heads.

People thought my kit was fashionable but that's all the agreement I got with my vision. Laptops still have hinges, there is no resistance against crap trackpads [2] and those expensive cases, people are still surprised you can use a keyboard and mouse with your iPad, etc. I believed in Win 8 and told people "just hit that damn windows key on your keyboard" but I think I was the only one.

[1] ham radio jargon for "radio interference"

[2] even mac-ers admit that Apple trackpads are at best tolerable

I use iPads mainly to hold music scores, and at the time, the Roland Piano Keyboard just would not hold a laptop securely.

Since then, I got a Yamaha Clavinova to replace the Roland and there always was the real piano. While both will hold a laptop securely, laptops are expensive displays. If I change from the iPad Pro, it will be to a mini with a 17 inch monitor, even bigger. Both of which are unused at this time, with earlier technology.

Until ios becomes MacOS (and not the other way around), an iPhone or iPad is vastly less productive (and vastly more frustrating) for me. Simple operations like getting an image URL are basically impossible except for McGuyver tricks (mailing myself the image) And I keep email off the iPad, to help focus on its intended use.

So I wonder if what the article is pointing at wasn’t actually the inability of merging iOS and MacOS fully more than anything.

It me is seems Apple thought the iPad would be the way of the future, not for everyone, but for most. Jobs compared Mac’s to trucks, while most people would be well served by a car (iPad).

This was a bold prediction, but not completely unreasonable. A lot of people these days use their phone as their primary computing device, in many developing countries, the phone is likely their only device. If this is serving so many well, it isn’t crazy to think people would want a larger version of that for doing more involved tasks.

However, phones themselves got bigger, and the iPad fell into this place where it wasn’t as convenient as a phone, but not better or different enough to make it worth moving to from a phone.

The addition of all the laptop-like features to the iPad was Apple’s slow realization that its place in the market didn’t make as much sense when devices like the iPhone Pro Max exist.

I know some people who absolutely love their iPads, though I was never one of them, despite many attempts. So it seems they have their place, it’s just not as widely adopted as initially predicted (at least not yet).

As phones have grown and the iPad and MacBook line has been blurred, I think Apple needs to evaluate where the iPad fits in the lineup and what it should be to make it better than both a phone and a laptop at some things that customers care about and make that definition clear. It could be that adding laptop features to the iPad was a mistake, maybe that was Apple forgetting what the device was and caving to what people wanted it to be… but it doesn’t seem like it will ever be what people want until it runs full macOS without being locked into the App Store.

Carving out a new category isn’t easy. Apple wasn’t the first to try to make the tablet happen, they were just the most successful. But it seems it’s a category that’s still trying to figure out what it is. I don’t think I’d frame that as gaslighting, as the article tries to do.