Almost a year ago, Apple released a new base iPad that seemed to muddy its tablet lineup. I agreed with a few articles that generalized the lineup's confusion, stretching to say the whole tablet category became a bit puzzling. I thought maybe tablets no longer fit in the tech world like they once did since laptops and smartphones are better than ever, overlapping some tablet strengths. A few months later, I sold my neglected iPad, favoring my MacBook. But perhaps it's time I upgrade my 3-pound brain and "think different." Maybe there's room for tablets.
They're selling like hotcakes
One evidence there's room for iPad after 13 years on the market are sales figures or units sold. From the most recent quarterly earnings report (via Six Colors) Q3'23:
"iPad revenue was $5.8 billion, down 20% year over year...At the same time, we continue to attract a large number of new customers to the iPad installed base, with over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter being new to the product." - Luca Maestri
And at MacWorld:
"...this quarter's iPad sales were the worst in more than three years. Still, a couple of quarters ago was the best iPad quarter of all time, so if you stop focusing on year-over-year numbers and instead look at the four-quarter moving average for iPad sales, it's about as high as it's ever been." - Jason Snell
So iPad sales are basically around an all-time high. And in just three months, iPad by itself earned Apple nearly $6 billion in revenue. That's actually incredible business. Figures are for this year's third quarter, while the second quarter saw 10.5 million iPads sold in three months (per Statista). That's a lot of iPads, which shows that there are literally many millions of people using a tablet for various things.
Real people use iPad and for real work too
While most customers might casually use iPad for little more than entertainment, it seems a fair amount of iPad fans are pros, adopting it as more than a mere tablet and embracing it as all the computer they need. The tablet has replaced a laptop for some, like Apple iPad power-users Jason Snell, Christopher Lawley, and Federico Viticci, who share their deep experiences relying mostly on iPad. And I know that’s feasible because I’ve experienced iPad’s versatility and capability for myself before.
Many others happily live with iPad as their main ‘PC’ too, like Denny at Beardy Guy Musings and Rob at Words from Rob. If you ask them, they’ll let you know just how useful Apple’s tablet has been and still is from day to day. After chatting with them recently, my cranial matter was adjusted. I realized that while the iPad may not have been the best fit in my personal use case, it is ideal for others’. But I had mistakenly applied my single view too broadly.
I found room for iPad before
I started to wonder why I let my 8th gen. iPad go despite mostly enjoying Safari's desktop-class browsing in the WordPress CMS and using a bluetooth mouse for text-selection. One reason was my iPad's 10.2" display; it was too small sometimes, like when customizing my blog's theme, the WordPress UI didn't fit properly. Yet a bigger factor was my tendency to be all-or-nothing, wanting one-gadget-to-rule-them-all. So if my iPad could only do 95% of what I wanted, instead of using a Windows laptop for the last 5%, I'd ditch iPad altogether (bye-bye baby with the bath water) and just use a "real" PC 100% of the time.
That said, I ended up buying an M1 MacBook Air. Can it do things iPad can't? Yes, like certain audio backgrounding tasks and using Xcode (not that I need those), or letting me create a Steam game with RPG Maker MZ. But iPad can do things the MacBook probably never will, like drawing with a stylus or directly pinching to zoom an image. And like I wrote recently, using an iPad isn't just about what it can do but how well it does things.
More capable iPad, more room for it
Hearing how others get "real" work done on iPad and enjoy the "iPad way" makes me welcome the tablet bug biting me. And I know I don't have to ditch my excellent MacBook in the process; I'd likely use both. In fact, I kind of miss the Sidecar and Universal Control features I used before. The iPad can serve as a 2nd display to the MacBook, either as an extended macOS screen or simply as the iPad itself but with the mouse cursor effortlessly moving to it from the Mac.
What are the chances the tablet bug bites me and I make room for iPad again? Quite high, actually. I just ordered a 12.9" iPad Pro for my wife, and she's getting the Apple Pencil. Once I see her with it, and provide tech support, this geek may feel tablet attraction. And I may or may not have already wish-listed a green iPad Air 4 refurb with Smart Keyboard Folio for myself.
So yeah, there's room for tablets after all.