Five years
ago today, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in a keynote where he spent a
lot of time sitting on a couch. The audience went wild, but out in the
rest of the world, not everyone stood up and cheered.
Just after
the big reveal, WIRED polled its readers to find out how they felt about
this new giant iPhone without the phone. About 60 percent said they
didn’t plan on buying one, mainly because their laptops and smartphones
already had them covered. They didn’t need a third thing in between.
Pundits
said much the same thing. “The iPad falls between two stools—not quite a
laptop, not quite a smartphone,” Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian.
“In other words, it’s the spork of the electronic consumer goods
world.”
Apple ended up selling a lot of sporks. But, funny thing,
that early, skeptical reception to the iPad was just ahead of its time.
In the end, you really just need the spoon and the fork.
Still,
the genius of the iPad, and the reason for its massive popularity, was
that Apple realized it didn’t have to make a device that people needed.
It just had to make something they would want. Later in his piece, which
published the weekend after Jobs’ 2010 keynote, Brooker distilled the
brilliant mundanity of the iPad down to its essence. “It looks ideal for
idly browsing the web while watching telly. And I suspect that’s what
it’ll largely be used for,” he said. “Millions of people watch TV while
checking their emails: it’s a perfect match for them.”
Effortless Leisure
Early
ads played heavily on the idea of the iPad as a device for leisure. In
one billboard I saw every day for weeks on my walk to work, an iPad sat
atop an anonymous lap in fashionable pants. It was a vision of computing
not as a productive activity—hunched over a laptop, gripping a
smartphone on the way to the next meeting—but as an unapologetic form of
relaxation. Even if you were using the iPad for work, Apple marketers
and the design of the device itself suggested you were getting things
done in a way that was relaxed, even effortless.
“Effortless”
definitely describes how easy it seemed for Apple to sell iPads in those
early days. Quarter after quarter, iPad sales doubled and sometimes
nearly tripled compared to the same time a year earlier. By its second
full year on sale, the number of iPads sold hit the double-digit
millions every quarter—more than 58 million total in Apple’s fiscal
2012. This thing that didn’t have a clear reason to be had found its way
into laps all over the world, seemingly inventing a whole new category
of computing in the process.
Apple hasn’t figured out many new things to do with the iPad to bring back the old excitement.
But
then a funny thing happened. The number of laps seeking iPads started
to get smaller. The first decline came in the third quarter of 2013,
when iPad sales fell from just over 17 million a year earlier to a
little more than 14.6 million. At the time, the absence of a new
flagship model was blamed. But then the falloff continued.
After a
record 26 million iPads sold at the beginning of 2014, the next three
quarters saw sales drop. To be sure, Apple is still selling a ton of
iPads—about 68 million in its last fiscal year. The issue isn’t people
don’t want iPads. It’s just that people don’t want them in increasing
numbers anymore. “Apple’s wildly successful iPad is plateauing,” as
Forrester’s James McQuivey put it.
And the reason isn’t hard to
figure out. It’s basically what WIRED readers pointed out way back in
2010. Smartphones and laptops pretty much already do all the stuff you
would use an iPad for. Except they didn’t as much back then.
Thinning Interest
The
most obvious change is the incredibly expanding smartphone screen.
Apple held out as long as it could as Android-based competitors kept
making screens bigger, and consumers kept responding. But now with the
iPhone 6 Plus, Apple has phone that is itself almost big enough to set
in your lap. At the same time, laptops—especially Apple’s—kept getting
thinner and lighter, encroaching on the iPad’s key selling points in the
process.
Apple still sells way more iPads than it does Macs. But
Mac sales are on the rise. And the Apple rumor mill is saying the next
MacBook Air will be the most iPad-ish yet.
At the same time,
Apple hasn’t figured out many new things to do with the iPad to bring
back the old excitement. During the October keynote to launch the latest
model, Apple executives gushed and gushed and gushed about how *thin*
the new iPad was. And it is! The iPad Air 2 is thin, elegant, and so
light it just might float right off your lap. But the drama is gone.
The
iPad is nice. You might still hang out together sometimes on the couch.
But when you’re done, you probably just put it down on the pile with
all the magazines and mail and other stuff stacking up on the coffee
table. It’s just another way to waste a little time.
