Apple fundamentally doesn't believe in a hybrid laptop/tablet "productivity" machine (for good reason, debatably). The iPad Pro is an attempt to bring iOS into the realm of productivity, rather than merging the experiences of iOS and Mac OS X.
Astonishingly successful? IPads out sell surface by 6 to 1 in revenue and 10 to 1 in units. And unlike surface, people actually use them primarily as tablets. Surface's success is almost entirely as a laptop with a secondary and relatively little used tablet mode. That's hardly been threatening to the iPad.
Microsofts vision of that convergence, of how to provide desktop class features in a tablet, is literally to put the WIMP desktop into a tablet. That's a completely different and fundamentally incompatible vision of how to make an advanced tablet UI to what we see in iOS 11, which is a complete and utter refutation of Microsoft's approach.
I think this is the angle of attack that Apple is taking here. They want to catch up to the handwriting and sketching abilities of Surface, but they don't want a hybrid OS.
In a lot of ways the Surface is a laptop with a detachable keyboard and the OS and eco system is still based on that. Apple wants their eco system to develop from a clean touch OS base into productivity areas. Having said that, they are really lagging in this area and the momentum has shifted well away from iPads in the business world.
The Surface might beat the iPad pro, but I do wonder if the either will be the future of productivity compared with a laptop and a tablet.
and this is why the Surface device sounds so exciting. iPad hasn't been exploited as a productivity device yet. With Microsoft's stronghold on productivity market, this should be interesting.
I think what you're attesting to is that the Surface Pro is not a bad or uncompetitive device, as I've heard elsewhere, and e.g. Wikipedia reports that Bloomberg reports that as of March 2013, total Surface sales were 1.5 million, with the Pro accounting for 1.1 million of them.
Which echoes what you say about what was in competition for your dollars, not iPads but real, not locked down with lots of software available laptops. E.g. the Pro is a niche product like Apple's OS X ones are now. The real trouble for Microsoft is how badly they executed on the Surface RT, and how many 10s billions of dollars they're letting their competitors snap up.
It's even weirder when Microsoft has been releasing Surface tablets for over a decade, which are generally well liked by their users (from what I understand, I've never personally owned one). They just created some dedicated touch UIs for core functionality, and optimized the higher-level UI elements for touch control. Surface Tablets certainly aren't perfect. But they can run any windows software, they have proper file management, and they can actually be used by professionals without major compromises.
For professional use, iPad OS will always be a compromise until it's fully integrated with MacOS. And it baffles me that Apple is trying to market iPads to professionals, yet their unwilling to take that step.
Keep in mind that Microsoft spent 2 generations before converging on the current strategy: 'non-Pro' Surfaces 1 and 2 were ARM-powered Windows RT devices that could only run Windows Store apps (similar to iPad). When noone seemed to want that, Microsoft went out and made 'non-Pro' Surface 3 just a cheaper, slimmer, lower-powered device, running the same version of Windows as its bigger sibling; also non-Pro was released after the Pro and just after the newest Intel Atom chip: http://ark.intel.com/products/85475/Intel-Atom-x7-Z8700-Proc...
I actually expected the iPad Pro to support OS X apps; maybe via being powered by a new Apple Ax frankenchip that runs iOS ARM as well as x86 code (another payoff from the investment to custom chip design) and/or by requiring to recompile with the latest XCode for the App Store (a payoff from the long investment in LLVM).
I owned a surface and I own an iPad Pro now. They aren’t even comparable in usability, Apple is great at refining features and making them work even if Microsoft is better at getting them out earlier. It’s like comparing the iPhone to WinCE.
By what metrics is it a failure? Because when I last looked at Microsoft's financial statements, their revenue was up due to the Surface (Profit was down for unrelated reasons).
I'm assuming you haven't used a Surface Pro but you can mark my words now, Apple will release a direct copy of the Surface within 3 years. The iPad Pro is a glorified iPad and will be utterly unusable for doing anything professional, so it's not a copy at this stage.
I see a lot of Surface Pro in the iPad[1]. That isn't a bad thing, it is great to have two design studios trying to out do each other. If you agree that these devices should work better on ARM chips rather than x86 chips, then the iPad has an advantage with an already ARM based ecosystem. Of course the Surface R/T tried that too, and stumbled. But I wonder if Apple saw that as a hint of where Microsoft might go.
I find it particularly interesting that at both companies these are the products that have a license to kill sacred cows[2]. The Surface R/T was "Windows on NOT Intel", the iPad has "stylus improved UI". Both of these were antithetic to Gates and Jobs way of thinking.
Both products (and I've got several different generations of both) feel to me like the "post PC" product. An application focused, battery operated, network aware device. I am a bit surprised that Surface hasn't embraced cellular connectivity as strongly as the iPad has, that is a key feature of "on the go" computing.[3]
[1] And chuckled when the new ones had the pen attach with magnets.
[2] The colloquialism, "that is a sacred cow." meaning a feature or rule that cannot be broken.
[3] Yeah, I know the 'tether it to your phone' mantra, I get that a lot, but it simpler (lower friction) to have it built in.
True, but the Microsoft Surface came three years before the Pro. And even if the iPad Pro were dominant, the iPhone and iPad are so closely related as products that counting the iPad 'innovation' is double-dipping a bit.
Surfaces, to be fair, aren't really direct competitors with iPads. iPads run a mobile OS, surface run Windows. You're using Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator on a Surface, not iOS apps.
I don't think surface is perfect, nor does it match the iPad in every area, but a proper kickstand + keyboard/touchpad + office puts it in a completely different league to the iPad in terms of productivity. If you want to work when mobile, this is right up there. It is overpriced, but so is the iPad.
As for 'cross contaminating', the convergence of tablet and laptop OSes is inevitable. IMO microsoft would be foolish to ignore it. Their moves toward convergence are also far better than Apples iOS influenced changes to OSX, despite being far more bold.
The conclusion I draw from everything I've heard is that the Surface Pro is a terrible iPad and an excellent PC laptop. Issues like the battery life, heat, weight, RAM free, and so on are reasonable for a Windows machine.
If my perspective is correct, look for the Surface Pro to cannibalize sales from MS's "partners." I do expect it to appeal to the kind of person who buys a PC laptop and an iPad. And that's a great market for MS to defend. But for people who want just a tablet, I expect iPads to carry on selling by the container.
If Microsoft's vision of everyone needing a computer is correct, the Surface pro will destroy the laptop. But if Apple's vision of a "post-PC" world is correct, the vast majority of the tablet market will be just tablets, and the iPad will continue to thrive.
It all seems to come down to whether you think of tablets as weak computers with a tablet interface or whether you think of them as an appliances that run software.
Even with Windows 10 and the latest Surface Pro 4, I don't think they're very usable as actual tablets. Virtually every time I see a Surface Pro, either in real life or even advertisements, it's being used as a laptop with the kickstand and keyboard attachment. You almost never see anybody use it as a tablet. This happens so much that it's actually hard to find a review of the SP4 that even shows what it's like to use as a tablet.
So while Windows 10 supports touch interaction, it's honestly not that great at it, and so far as I can tell nobody really uses it outside of content consumption. But by taking this approach, Microsoft skipped the massive step of needing to get new versions of all major software developed for a truly touch-centric interface.
The SP4 is also not nearly as good as a family device. It's much harder to use and is far more susceptible to user error.
Apple seems to be taking the opposite approach. They're taking a hit early on by building up everything from scratch for a touch interface, but their bet is that over the long-term the end result will be better.
I don't know which approach will pan out, of course. I suspect to begin with the iPad Pro will simply serve a more affluent segment of exactly the same demographic that the iPad has always served, but over time it might expand to more professional users as its software develops and begins to rival desktop software.
I'm not sure I follow your argument that they can't compete in the hardware/software market based on the design of their webpage. Scroll down the About page [1] and I don't see much that's different from the iPad page [2].
Considering the Surface tablet isn't in as many markets as the iPad, I personally assumed they meant U.S. only, and the title already states "online sales." This is good for Microsoft, however let's also note that tablet sales have been falling over all. I do think hybrids are the future, and Apple is missing that boat though. The iPad Pro is a poor attempt that honestly, I would have expected from the Microsoft of old.
Panos Panay is doing a great job with the Surface line, though I was a little disappointed with the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book launches, both of which were plagued with firmware and driver bugs.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10858474/microsoft-earning... http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9599674/microsoft-q1-2016...
Apple fundamentally doesn't believe in a hybrid laptop/tablet "productivity" machine (for good reason, debatably). The iPad Pro is an attempt to bring iOS into the realm of productivity, rather than merging the experiences of iOS and Mac OS X.
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