One of the most important mobile devices introduced in the last eleven years was the iPad. In 2010, Steve Jobs sat in an easy chair on the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and showed off this new tablet and proclaimed that the tablets would one day outsell PCs. He used the analogy that PCs were trucks and tablets were cars.
He further explained his analogy at the WSJ D8 conference in 2010:
"Apple CEO Steve Jobs often compared the transition from desktop/laptop PCs to tablets with the transition from trucks to cars. Just as trucks waned in popularity with the urbanization of America, Jobs theorized, so, too, would desktops and laptops with the advent of the tablet. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at our D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”
This Jobsiean analogy was controversial at the time and eleven years later, we now know PCs are not dead and are outselling tablets by a high margin. In 2020 we sold 275.15 million PCs worldwide.
That same year, 164.1 million tablets were sold around the world.
At the iPad launch in 2010, Steve Jobs truly believed that tablets, especially the iPad, would someday take over the role of the PC eventually. While that has not happened, Apple's recent introduction of the iPad Pro with its powerful M1 processor is making significant strides as a stand-alone computing device that has most of the same power and functions as traditional laptops. During Apple's last quarter financials reported last week, iPad revenue was $7.37 billion, a 12 % year-over-year growth for that same quarter.
The Mac revenue was $8.24 billion for the last quarter making Mac revenue only about $1 billion more than the iPad.
I recently took my first trip since being grounded by Covid-19 in March of 2020. Half of that travel week was business-related, while the other half was related to a family wedding in Denver. For my first trip in over a year, I wanted to travel light and took only the iPad Pro with the M1 chip I am testing. I have traveled with iPads since 2010 but also carried a MacBook or lightweight Windows laptop as well to do my heavy lifting work on the road.
I had been using the iPad Pro with the M1 processor and the Magic Keyboard for a short time before this trip so I already knew of its faster processing speeds and enhanced software that is very business and productivity friendly.
Anecdotally, I know of many mainstream consumers who have already transitioned to iPads and tablets as their only computing devices. My wife, who is a trained software engineer and a highly proficient Windows user, now uses her iPad 95% of the time, only defaulting to her Windows laptop for specialized financial applications.
Apple shipped 12.9 million iPads in the second quarter of 2021 and accounted for 31.9% of the market share, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PCD Tracker.
Apple’s nearest rival, Samsung, shipped 8 million tablets in the quarter and held a 19.6% market share. Lenovo Group Limited followed in the third position with 4.7 million units shipped, while Amazon.com was fourth with Fire tablet shipments of 4.3 million and a market share of 10.7%, according to GSMArena.com.
Apple's market share is healthy and still growing. Most tablet researchers I speak with see Apple's iPad growth continuing well into the future as Apple gives the iPads more power and makes them more Mac-like over time.
If Steve Jobs were alive today, I am sure he would still believe that the iPad will someday become the defacto mobile computing device even though current numbers suggest he would be wrong.
However, if you look closely at the evolution of the iPad over these last 11 years, and how Tim Cook and the team has driven its design and power to new heights, one could look at the current iPad growth records as perhaps a small indication that Jobs' original vision for the iPad is still achievable.
After using the new M1-based iPad Pro and the newest MacBook Air M1 model, I can see these products being on a collision course. Indeed, Apple is making more iOS apps work on the Mac and with Apple's overall continuity capabilities synched across both OS platforms and in the cloud, they are increasingly encroaching on each other's territory.
From Apple's standpoint, this is clearly a designed strategy and one that I am certain Tim Cook is driving to make Jobs' original iPad vision a future possibility. From Apple's standpoint, there will be a time when they don't care whether a person buys a Mac or an iPad.
Laptop vendors of course would argue that a PC or laptop will never be eclipsed by a tablet, although they are creating many two-in-ones that can work as a laptop as well as a tablet to hedge their bets.
It has been 11 years since Steve Jobs introduced the iPad and it has become one of Apple's most successful products. During this time demand for PCs and laptops have ebbed and flowed, but tablets have not replaced them and may never do so.
On the other hand, Steve Jobs' track record of predicting the future has been pretty accurate many times in the past. Given Tim Cook and the team's understanding of Jobs' vision and the fact that the iPad and MacBooks are on a collision course, it would not surprise me if Steve Jobs' vision for tablets someday becomes a reality.
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August 05, 2021 at 09:00PM
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Is Steve Jobs’ Original Vision For The iPad Still Achievable? - Forbes
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