The Curious Case of the Curious Case

Friday, 11 December 2015

Joanna Stern tested Apple’s new Smart Battery Case for five days, and likes it a lot:

Let’s get this out of the way: The bar for battery-case design is extremely low. Most are chunky and made of black matte plastic, requiring you to attach two pieces to your phone. You choose a battery case for utility, not fashion.

Apple’s Smart Battery Case, though still fairly unsightly, is ahead of those. Bend back the top and slide in your phone. It feels just like Apple’s smooth, soft-touch wraparound silicone case, except… with a protruding, awkward battery on the back. The battery juts out as if your phone will soon give birth to a rectangular alien.

Still, I’ll take it over all the ugly messes sold by Mophie, Anker and others, especially since it provides better protection for the phone. A lip curves just above the screen to prevent the glass from hitting a hard surface and an interior lining provides better shock absorption than hard plastic. Plus, the grippy material is much easier to hold and doesn’t feel like it will slip from my hands.

The Verge’s Lauren Goode disagrees:

Apple’s smart battery case is fine, then, if you want a softer case or a “passive” battery charging experience, with zero control over or understanding of how the case actually charges your phone. Maybe that’s what Apple is hoping: that buyers of this thing will slip it on and never take it off, charging their iPhones entirely through the case’s Lightning port going forward, forgetting about its big ol’ bump in the back. They will be pleased, finally, with their iPhone 6’s or 6S’s battery life, and the memory of spending an extra $99 for it, rather than having it just work that way in the first place, will eventually fade away.

It’s fine if you don’t want exterior indicator lights, or a even a case that gives you a 0 to 100 percent charge. After all, this one was designed for the iPhone, by the same company that made your iPhone. For some people, that’s a big draw.

In either case this will probably sell like hot cakes. It fits nicely in holiday stockings. ’Tis the season. Just know that from a pure performance and even a design perspective, Apple’s effort is not the best you can get.

(I can almost see her eyes rolling as she typed those italicized words in the second quoted paragraph.)

Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy best captured what most of us thought when we first saw it: “These things look weird.”

That was certainly my first impression when I got mine Tuesday morning. The looks-like-it’s-pregnant-with-an-iPod-Touch design is certainly curious. I think to understand why it looks like this we have to ask why it even exists:

• People who use their phones heavily — power users, if you will — struggle to get through a day on a single charge with the iPhone 6/6S.

• The Plus models offer so much more battery life that getting through the day on a single charge isn’t a problem, even for power users who are on their phones all day long. But most people don’t want an iPhone that large.

• Apple has long sold third-party battery cases in its stores, so they know how popular they are.

• Existing battery cases all suffer from similar design problems, as outlined by Joanna Stern above. They make the entire device look and feel chunky, and most of them are built from materials that don’t feel good. None of them integrate in any way with the software on the iPhone, and most of them use micro USB instead of Lightning for charging the case.

• Lastly, Apple claims the Smart Battery Case tackles a problem I wasn’t aware existed: that existing battery cases adversely affect cellular reception because they’re putting a battery between the phone’s antenna and the exterior of the case.

So I think Apple’s priorities for the Smart Battery Case were as follows — and the order matters:

1. Provides effective battery life equivalent to the iPhone 6S Plus.
2. Feels good in your hand.
3. Makes it easy and elegant to insert and remove the phone.
4. Works as a durable protective case.
5. Prevents the case’s battery from affecting cellular reception.
6. Looks good.

That “looks good” is last on the list is unusual for an Apple product, to say the least. Looking good isn’t always first on Apple’s list of priorities, but it’s seldom far from the top. But in this case it makes sense: Apple sells great-looking silicone and leather cases for people who aren’t looking for a battery case, and all existing third-party battery cases are clunky in some way.

Ungainly though the case’s hump is, I can’t help but suspect one reason for it might be, counterintuitively, a certain vanity on the part of its designers. Not for the sake of the case itself, but for the iPhone. Third-party “thick from top to bottom” battery cases make it impossible to tell whether the enclosed phone is itself thick or thin. Apple’s Smart Battery Case makes it obvious that it’s a thin iPhone in a case which has a thick battery on the back. And I’ll say this for Apple: they are owning that hump. The hero photo of the case on the packaging is a face-on view of the back of the case.

But I think the main reasons for this design are practical. The battery doesn’t extend to the top in order to accommodate the hinge design for inserting and removing the phone. Why it doesn’t extend to the bottom is a little less obvious. I suspect one reason is that that’s where the “passively coupling antenna” is.¹ Extending the battery to cover it would defeat the purpose. Also, there’s a hand feel aspect to it — normally I rest the bottom of my iPhone on my pinky finger. With this case, I can rest the bottom ridge of the hump on my pinky, and it’s kind of nice. I also like putting my index finger atop the hump.

So the Smart Battery Case looks weird. Typical battery cases look fat. Whether you prefer the weird look of the Smart Battery Case to the fat look of a typical case is subjective. Me, I don’t like the way any of them look. But after using the Smart Battery Case for three days, and having previously spent time using the thinnest available cases from Mophie, I feel confident saying Apple’s Smart Battery Case feels better when you’re holding it than any other battery case, both because of the material and its shape. It’s not even a close call. It also feels sturdier — this is the most protective iPhone case Apple has ever made, with rigid reinforced sides and a slightly higher lip rising above the touchscreen. The Smart Battery Case also clearly looks better from your own face-on perspective when using the phone. (Mophie’s cases look better than most, but they emboss an obnoxious “mophie” logotype on the front-facing chin. If Apple doesn’t print anything on the front face of the iPhone, why in the world would a case maker?)

Patents, by the way, are a non-issue regarding the Smart Battery Case’s design. A well-placed little birdie who is perched in a position to know told me that Nilay Patel’s speculation that the unusual design was the byproduct of Apple trying to steer clear of patents held by Mophie (or any other company for that matter) are “absolute nonsense”. This birdie was unequivocal on the matter. Whether you like it, hate it, or are ambivalent about it, this is the battery case Apple wanted to make.

My take is that the Smart Battery Case is an inelegant design, but it is solving a problem for which, to date, no one has created an elegant solution. Apple has simply chosen to make different severe trade-offs than the existing competition. In that sense, it is a very Apple-like product — like the hockey-puck mouse or the iMac G4.

On Capacity, Simplicity, and the Intended Use Case

Most battery cases have an on/off toggle switch, controlling when the case is actually charging the phone. The reason for this is that you can squeeze more from a battery case if you only charge the phone when it’s mostly depleted. Here’s a passage from Mophie’s FAQ page:

When should I turn on my mophie case?

To get the most charge out of your case, turn it on around 10%-20% and keep the case charging without using it until your iPhone hits 80% battery life. From there, you can either wait until it gets low again or top it off when the battery is less than 80%. Apple’s batteries fast-charge to 80%, then switch to trickle charging for the last 20%.

Simplicity is a higher priority for Apple than fiddly control. If a peripheral can get by without an on/off switch, Apple is going to omit the switch. (Exhibit B: Apple Pencil.) The whole point of the Smart Battery Case is that you charge it up and put your iPhone in it and that’s it. Complaining about the lack of an on/off toggle or external charge capacity indicator lights on the Smart Battery Case reminds me of the complaints about the original iPhone omitting the then-ubiquitous green/red hardware buttons for starting and ending phone calls. Sure, there was a purpose to them, but in the end the simplification was worth it. If your iPhone is in the case, it’s charging. That’s it.

Regarding the battery capacity of the case, here’s Lauren Goode, author of the aforelinked review for The Verge, on Twitter:

A quick comparison for you: $99 Apple Battery Case 1877 mAh, $100 Mophie Juice Pack Air 2750 mAh, $50 Incipio Offgrid Express 3000 mAh

Nothing could better encapsulate the wrong way of looking at the Smart Battery Case than this tweet. The intended use of the Smart Battery Case is to allow prolonged, heavy use of an iPhone 6/6S throughout one day. In my testing, and judging by the reviews of others, its 1,877 mAh battery is enough for that. Adding a bigger battery would have just made it even heavier and more ungainly.

And the very name of the Incipio Offgrid Express suggests that it is intended for an entirely different use case: traveling away from power for more than a day.

Which in turn brings me to Tim Cook’s comments to Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff yesterday:

Some also see the introduction of an Apple battery case as an admission that battery life on the iPhone 6 and 6s isn’t all it should be.

Cook, though, said that “if you’re charging your phone every day, you probably don’t need this at all. But if you’re out hiking and you go on overnight trips… it’s kind of nice to have.”

The Smart Battery Case would certainly help with an overnight hiking trip, but I think Cook was off-message here, because that scenario is really not what it was designed for. Big 5,000 mAh (or more) external battery chargers (or the highest capacity, extremely thick battery cases from third parties) are far better suited to that scenario than the Smart Battery Case. But Ulanoff’s preceding paragraph points to the marketing predicament inherent in a first-party Apple battery case: that it implies the built-in battery of the iPhone 6S is insufficient.

The clear lesson is that it’s far better to give a phone more battery life by making the phone itself thicker and including a correspondingly thicker (and thus bigger) internal battery than by using any sort of external battery. After a few days using this case, my thoughts turn not to the Smart Battery Case itself but instead to my personal desire that Apple had made the 6/6S form factor slightly thicker. Not a lot thicker. Just a little — just enough to boost battery life around 15-20 percent or so.² That wouldn’t completely alleviate the need for external batteries. But it would eliminate a lot of my need — my phone dies only a few times a year, but when it does, it almost invariably happens very late at night.

I emphasized the word “personal” in the preceding paragraph because I realize my needs and desires are not representative of the majority. I think the battery life of the iPhone 6S as-is is sufficient for the vast majority of typical users. I suspect Cook went with the overnight hiking scenario specifically to avoid the implication that the built-in battery is insufficient. But the better explanation is that the built-in battery is insufficient for power users who use their iPhones far more than most people do.

My Advice

If you find yourself short on battery with your iPhone every day (or even most days), and you can’t make an adjustment to, say, put a charging dock on your desk or in your car to give your iPhone’s internal battery a periodic snack, then you should probably bite the bullet and switch to a 6S Plus. However bulky the Plus feels in your pocket and hands, it feels less bulky to me than the iPhone 6S with any battery pack. An iPhone 6S Plus, even with a normal case on it, weighs noticeably less than an iPhone 6S with the Smart Battery Case. If you need the extra battery capacity every day, you might as well get the Plus. (If you actually prefer the bigger Plus to the 4.7-inch devices, you’re in luck — you get the screen size you prefer, and a significantly longer-lasting battery. My advice here is for those who prefer the 4.7-inch size, other considerations aside.)

That doesn’t describe me, however. On a typical day, my iPhone 6S seldom drops below 20 percent by the time I go to sleep. But when I’m traveling, I often need a portable battery of some sort. Cellular coverage can be spotty (which drains the battery), and when I’m away from home, I tend to do more (or even the entirety) of my daily computing on the iPhone. Conferences, in particular, can be dreadful on battery life. At WWDC my iPhone can drop to 50 percent by the time the keynote is over Monday morning.

In recent years, rather than use a battery case, I’ve switched to carrying a portable external battery. My favorite for the past year or so is the $80 Mophie Powerstation Plus 2X. It’s relatively small, packs a 3,000 mAh capacity, and has built-in USB and Lightning cables. At conferences or for work travel, it’s easily stashed in my laptop bag, so my pockets aren’t weighed down at all, and my iPhone isn’t saddled with an unnatural case. If I do need to carry it in my pocket, it’s not too bad. It’s also easier to share with friends or family than a battery case. At night, I just plug the Powerstation into an AC adapter, and my iPhone into the Powerstation, and both devices get charged — no need for a separate charger or any additional cables.

The big advantage to using a battery case instead of an external battery pack is that you can easily keep using your phone while it charges. That’s awkward, at best, while your phone is tethered by a cable to a small brick.

If I were going to go back to using a battery case, there’s no question in my mind that I’d go with Apple’s. The only downside to it compared to Mophie’s (and the others — but I think Mophie is clearly the leader of the pack) is that it looks funny from the back. But to my eyes it doesn’t look that funny, and though third-party cases don’t look weird, they don’t look (or feel) good. In every other way, Apple’s Smart Battery Case wins: it’s all Lightning, so any Lightning peripherals you have will work, and there’s no need to pack a grody micro USB cable; it supplies more than enough additional power to get you through an active day; its unibody design makes it much easier to insert and remove the phone; and it feels much better in hand. ★

What Goes Up

Friday, 13 November 2015

This piece by Bryan Clark for TheNextWeb caught my eye last weekend — “We’ve Reached — Maybe Passed — Peak Apple: Why the Narrative Needs to Change”:

Last month, Apple’s latest earnings call announced its “most successful year ever.” The numbers were reported, the stories were spun and Wall Street basically anointed Apple the god of capitalism.

They’re all wrong.

Apple wasn’t wrong — fiscal 2015 was Apple’s most successful year ever, by the objective measures of both revenue and profit. I suppose you can decide to define “most successful year ever” in terms of something else, like percentage growth or stock price gains, but revenue and profit are pretty fair measures.

I missed it where “Wall Street basically anointed Apple the god of capitalism”. All I noticed was that Apple’s stock price went up about two percent the day after earnings were announced and has since fallen back to where it was before Q4 earnings were announced.

The actual story, the story we should be telling, involves a different narrative. Apple is the largest company in the world, but success is fleeting. While the numbers are impressive, they don’t come close to painting an accurate picture about how much trouble Apple is really in.

Apple’s rise under Steve Jobs was historic. Its fall under Tim Cook is going to be much slower, more painful.

The fall usually is more painful than the rise. Who writes a sentence like that?

And if Apple’s fall under Cook is much slower than its rise under Steve Jobs, it’s going to take 20 or 30 years. Apple’s revival was long, slow, and relatively steady.

Apple lives and dies by the iPhone. iPad sales are flat, iPod’s are all but irrelevant, and while Mac sales are up, they’re nowhere close to the workhorse that can continue to carry Apple should they experience a downturn in iPhone sales. There is no Plan B.

One look at the numbers tells a pretty decisive tale.

Percentage of revenue derived from iPhone sales:

• 2012: 46.38%
• 2013: 52.07%
• 2014: 56.21%
• 2015: 62.54%

This is the part of Clark’s piece that got my attention. It’s a common refrain these days — just search Google for “Apple is too dependent on the iPhone”.

Clark makes it sound like this is because the rest of Apple’s business is in decline, whereas the truth is that the iPhone continues to grow at an astonishing rate that even Apple’s other successful products can’t match. Is it worrisome that iPad sales continue to decline? Sure. Would it be better for Apple if the iPad were selling in iPhone-esque quantities? Of course. But iPad still sold 9.9 million units and generated $4.3 billion in revenue last quarter.

Arguing that Apple is in trouble because the iPhone is so popular is like arguing that the ’90s-era Chicago Bulls were in trouble because Michael Jordan was so good. It’s true Jordan couldn’t play forever — and the iPhone won’t be the most profitable product in the world forever. But in the meantime, the Bulls were well-nigh unbeatable, and Apple, for now at least, is unfathomably profitable.¹ Just like how it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, it’s better to have tremendous success for some period of time than never to have had tremendous success in the first place. Right?

What I don’t get is why Apple gets singled out for its singular success, but other companies don’t. 92 percent of Google’s revenue last year came from online advertising. And more importantly, I don’t get why Apple’s non-iPhone businesses are so quickly written off only because they’re so much smaller than the iPhone.

Apple’s total revenue for last quarter was $51.5 billion. The iPhone accounted for $32.2 billion of that, which means Apple’s non-iPhone business generated about $19.3 billion in revenue. All of Microsoft in the same three months: around $21 billion. All of Google: $18.78 billion. Facebook: $4.5 billion. Take away every single iPhone sold — all of them — and Apple’s remaining business for the quarter was almost as big as Microsoft’s, bigger than Google’s, and more than four times the size of Facebook’s. And this is for the July-September quarter, not the October-December holiday quarter in which Apple is strongest.

Nothing in the world compares to Apple’s iPhone business, including anything else Apple makes. But a multi-billion-per-quarter business here (Mac), a multi-billion-per-quarter business there (iPad), a “Services” division that generates more revenue than Facebook, and an “Other” category (Watch, Apple TV, Beats, iPod) that booked $3 billion in a non-holiday quarter — and it’s clear that Apple’s non-iPhone businesses, combined, amount to a massive enterprise.

Here’s a Larry Dignon column about whether iPad Pro will make “iPad material to Apple again”:

Apple’s iPad sales are on the borderline of being immaterial to the company, but some analysts are betting that enterprise sales of the iPad Pro can turn the product line around. […]

Nevertheless, the iPad franchise is sucking wind relative to the iPhone. Apple’s annual report shows the iPad is 10 percent of overall sales. Once a business falls below 10 percent a company doesn’t have to break it out. In other words, the iPad could be lumped into “other” with the Apple Watch and iPod if current trends continue.

This is a product line that, in and of itself, generated just about exactly the same revenue last quarter as all of Google’s non-advertising business did for the entire fiscal year. But Apple is the company that is considered lopsided and worrisomely dependent upon a single product.

Name a product introduced in the last five years that has been more successful than the iPad — either in terms of revenue and profit for its maker, or in terms of aggregate hours of daily use and customer satisfaction of its users. I can’t think of one.

Now consider the Apple Watch. Fast Company called it “a flop” back in July. Here’s a guy on Quora — Jason Lancaster, editor of a website called Accurate Auto Advice — answering, in the affirmative, whether Apple has “already lost the market for self driving cars” (not joking):

Third, Apple may have peaked. Call me a hater, but what reason is there to assume Apple’s reputation is going to stay where it is? The watch was a flop, and their only consistent source of success is the iPhone, as the market for Macs and iPads is drying up (as it is for all computer hardware companies).

Forget the fact that Mac sales are growing, or that iPad sales, though in decline, remain roughly 10 million per quarter. What I enjoy about this is Lancaster’s having written off the Watch as a flop — he even uses the past tense.

Here’s what that flop looks like:

Apple has shipped seven million Apple Watches since its introduction this spring, giving the technology giant a firm lead in the nascent smartwatch market, according to researcher Canalys.

That number falls shy of some Wall Street analysts’ expectations for Apple’s first new device category since 2010. But, for perspective, consider this: Apple sold more smartwatches from April through September than all other vendors combined sold over the past five quarters, Canalys reports.

If we estimate the average selling price for an Apple Watch at $500 (reasonable), that’s $3.5 billion in revenue for the year to date — prior to the holiday quarter that is almost certainly going to be the strongest for watch sales annually.

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Back to Bryan Clark’s TheNextWeb piece:

Steve Jobs is almost entirely responsible for Apple’s cult-like following.

By streamlining the company in an attempt to make it profitable, the same vision started to makes its way through every product Apple created. Rather than bloated and flashy, Jobs created a movement of decidedly minimalist devices that required not much more than an occasional charge and a user that knew where the power button was.

Between aesthetically pleasing design, rock-solid hardware, and software that responded as if it were built for the machine — not in spite of it — Apple culture became a cult of Jobs-worshipping consumers willing to buy anything with a lowercase “i” in front of it.

That never happened. The G4 Cube didn’t sell. iPod Hi-Fi didn’t sell. Those weren’t just non-hit products — they were both products that Steve Jobs himself really liked. I’ve heard that he had a stack of unopened iPod Hi-Fis in his office. Apple products have never been blindly accepted by the mass market — they’ve succeeded on their merits and by meeting actual demand. As I wrote two years ago:

To posit that Apple customers are somehow different, that when they feel screwed by Apple their response is to go back for more, is “Cult of Mac” logic — the supposition that most Apple customers are irrational zealots or trend followers who just mindlessly buy anything with an Apple logo on it. The truth is the opposite: Apple’s business is making customers happy, and keeping them happy. They make products for discriminating people who have higher standards and less tolerance for design flaws or problems.

Clark finally tells us what Apple’s biggest problems are:

There are larger issues on the horizon: For example, how does Apple compete with Windows and Android?

Both have proven to be amazingly adept in recent years not only at competing with Apple in form factor, but functionality as well.

Two companies that are innovating, not searching for identity outside of a singular product.

Two companies that are on the way up, not down.

Windows and Android, got it.

The Apple Watch is great, but it’s never going to carry Apple like the iPhone until it works like one. The watch is undeniably cool, but it really fails to do anything better than your phone.

To make matters worse, you have to have an iPhone close by in order to even use most of its features. Similar Android models are self-contained and only require an occasional sync.

The autonomous car project sounds promising, but competing against Google and Tesla in addition to auto industry giants like Lexus and Mercedes is an uphill battle full of technology challenges, government red tape and changing century-old transportation conventions.

The best I can gather from this mishmash of a conclusion is that Apple Watch should have somehow debuted as a first-generation product that could stand toe-to-toe with the iPhone (which is now in its ninth generation), and that Apple’s car product should already be here. If there were no rumors of an Apple car, we’d be hearing that Apple is going to miss out on the next big industry that is ripe for disruption from the tech industry. But because there are rumors and hints pointing to an Apple car, we’re hearing that cars are too difficult, the established companies too entrenched. Ed Colligan’s line for the ages — “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” — was also about an industry full of longstanding giants, Google, technology challenges, government red tape, and century-old conventions. Minus the “government red tape”, that’s a pretty good description of the watch and home entertainment system industries, too.

I’m not here to argue the opposite of Colligan — that Apple’s success in these new fields is preordained — because that would be foolish. But it’s just as foolish to argue that Apple can’t succeed — or that anything less than iPhone-sized success in a new endeavor is a failure. ★

The iPad Pro

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

First impressions last a lifetime, goes the adage. You’re going to have to forget your first impressions of the iPad to understand the iPad Pro.

When Apple introduced the original iPad in 2010, it was explicitly positioned in a new role for a device — somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook. That seems obvious, but the problem, for the iPad, is that people loved their iPhones and MacBooks. The only way iPad would succeed, Steve Jobs said, was if it were “far better at doing some key things” than either an iPhone or MacBook.

Apple succeeded. Simply by nature of having a bigger display, the iPad was better than the iPhone for numerous tasks — watching videos or reading long-form text, to name just two. No one would dispute that bigger displays are better for certain tasks — you can prove the productivity gains.

What made the iPad better than a MacBook, in at least some ways, was more subjective than objective. Objectively, a MacBook was faster, by a large factor, could multitask, and offered a rich library of serious productivity apps. A Mac was, simply put, more powerful than an iPad — both in terms of hardware and software. The iPad had some objective advantages — battery life and the pixel density of its display are two that come to mind.¹

The trade-offs were obvious. The iPad offered the same conceptual simplicity and intimacy as the iPhone, with the “lean-back” ergonomics of a tablet, at the cost of power — hardware performance and software complexity.

It was, in short, just a big iPhone. To the eyes of many in the tech industry, “just a big iPhone” was damning. They wanted the iPad to impress in terms of power. To the eyes of tens of millions of users, however, “just a big iPhone” was strong praise. An iPhone with a 10-inch display sounded just great.

The intervening five years have turned all of this upside down. The iPad Pro now impresses solely by dint of its engineering. Anyone who doesn’t see this is blinded by their established impressions of the first few iPads.

For the moment, put aside the form factor differences (tablet with optional keyboard vs. hinged clamshell), conceptual differences in iOS and OS X (direct touchscreen manipulation of full-screen apps vs. a mouse pointer and tiled windows) and software differences (simpler iOS apps vs. more complex OS X apps). All those points are worth consideration, but for now, put them aside. Right now, today, the iPad Pro is a peer to the current lineup of MacBooks in terms of computational hardware performance.

The iPad Pro is without question faster than the new one-port MacBook or the latest MacBook Airs. I’ve looked at several of my favorite benchmarks — Geekbench 3, Mozilla’s Kraken, and Google’s Octane 2 — and the iPad Pro is a race car. It’s only a hair slower than my year-old 13-inch MacBook Pro in single-core measurements. Graphics-wise, testing with GFXBench, it blows my MacBook Pro away. A one-year-old maxed-out MacBook Pro, rivaled by an iPad in performance benchmarks. Just think about that. According to Geekbench’s online results, the iPad Pro is faster in single-core testing than Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 4 with a Core-i5 processor. The Core-i7 version of the Surface Pro 4 isn’t shipping until December — that model will almost certainly test faster than the iPad Pro. But that’s a $1599 machine with an Intel x86 CPU. The iPad Pro starts at $799 and runs an ARM CPU — Apple’s A9X. There is no more trade-off. You don’t have to choose between the performance of x86 and the battery life of ARM.

We’ve now reached an inflection point. The new MacBook is slower, gets worse battery life, and even its cheapest configuration costs $200 more than the top-of-the-line iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is more powerful, cheaper, has a better display, and gets better battery life. It’s not a clear cut-and-dry win — MacBooks still have more RAM (the iPad Pro, in all configurations, has 4 GB of RAM, although Apple still isn’t publishing this information — MacBook Pros have either 8 or 16 GB), are expandable, and offer far more storage. But at a fundamental level — CPU speed, GPU speed, quality of the display, quality of the sound output, and overall responsiveness of interface — the iPad Pro is a better computer than a MacBook or MacBook Air, and a worthy rival to the far more expensive MacBook Pros.

The entire x86 computer architecture is living on borrowed time. It’s a dead platform walking. The future belongs to ARM, and Apple’s A-series SoC’s are leading the way.

The A9X didn’t come out of nowhere. Watching Apple’s A-series chips gain on x86 over the past five years, we’ve all been speculating about whether Apple might someday start using ARM chips in MacBooks. As of now, it’s only a question of whether they want to.

What Apple Means by ‘Pro’

With the Mac Pro, the “pro” really does stand for “professional”. There’s pretty much no reason for anyone to buy a Mac Pro unless their work is computationally expensive. There aren’t many people left whose work is slowed down regularly by the performance of their computer. The Mac Pro is aimed at that market. (That said, a higher-end iMac will outperform a Mac Pro in many tasks that aren’t well-suited to multicore parallel computing. The Mac Pro is due for an update.)

With the MacBook Pro, on the other hand, “pro” isn’t really short for “professional”. It’s more like “deluxe” — a signifier that it’s a higher-end product than its non-pro siblings. Faster, better, and accordingly higher-priced. A MacBook Pro with 1 TB of SSD storage is indeed a terrific portable computer for “professional” use by, say, a photographer or film editor or software developer — people who truly stretch the performance of any computer today, portable or otherwise. But a decked-out MacBook Pro is also a terrific and perfectly reasonable choice for anyone who can simply afford one. MacBook Airs don’t have retina displays (and likely will never be upgraded to offer them), and the one-port MacBook is relatively slow.

The iPad Pro is “pro” in the way MacBook Pros are. Genuine professionals with a professional need — visual artists in particular — are going to line up for them. But it’s also a perfectly reasonable choice for casual iPad users who just want a bigger display, louder (and now stereo) speakers, and faster performance.

Anyone tying themselves in knots looking for a specific target audience for the iPad Pro is going about it the wrong way. There is no single target audience. Is the iPad Pro meant for office workers in the enterprise? Professional artists creating content? Casual users playing games, watching movies, and reading? The answer is simply “Yes”.

Smart Keyboard and Converting to a Laptop Form Factor

So unlike the original iPad of 2010, which carved out new territory between that of an iPhone and MacBook, the iPad Pro is clearly an alternative to a MacBook. I’m sure someone out there will carry both a MacBook (of any sort) and an iPad Pro while traveling, but I don’t really see the sense of that. The iPad Mini makes perfect sense as a travel companion to a MacBook. The iPad Air does too — especially for someone who watches a lot of video or prefers larger type while reading. But the iPad Pro stands as an alternative to a MacBook. If you want to carry a MacBook, you want a smaller, lighter iPad as a companion, and you don’t need a keyboard for it. If you want to carry an iPad Pro, you might as well get the Smart Keyboard cover and leave the MacBook at home.

The trade-offs are varied. If you don’t type much, or don’t mind using the on-screen keyboard when you do, you’re probably already sold on the iPad-as-primary-portable-computer lifestyle. If you do type a lot and want a hardware keyboard, the appeal of the iPad Pro is going to largely hinge on your affinity for the Smart Keyboard.

I’ve been using this iPad Pro review unit (128 GB, with cellular — top of the line kit, natch) for eight days, and most of that time I’ve had the Smart Keyboard attached. For just plain typing, it’s not that bad — I’ve written this entire review using it, Federico Viticci-style. I went into it thinking that my biggest complaint would be the keys themselves — I like my keyboards clicky, with a lot of travel. But I adjusted to it pretty quickly, and I kind of like the way it feels, as a tactile surface. It almost feels like canvas.

My complaints and frustrations are more from the software, both iOS 9.1 itself and individual apps, both from Apple and third-party developers. Trying to use the iPad Pro as a laptop with the Smart Keyboard exposes the seams of an OS that was clearly designed for touchscreen use first. These seams aren’t new — I’m sure anyone who has tried using an iPad of any sort with a paired Bluetooth keyboard has run into the same things. This is simply the first time I’ve tried using an iPad with a hardware keyboard for an extended period for large amounts of work.

I almost wrote “for large amounts of writing” in the preceding paragraph, but the problems with an iPad and a hardware keyboard are more than about typing. A large part of my work is reading, and with a laptop, the keyboard is a big part of the reading experience. In fact, with the iPad Pro, the keyboard is even more important than it is on a MacBook — and today, it falls short.

Here’s what I mean. First, when the iPad Pro is open with the keyboard attached, holding your arm up to touch the screen for anything longer than a moment or two is ergonomically uncomfortable. Apple has stated for years that this is why they don’t make the displays on MacBooks or iMacs touchscreens (that, combined with the relatively tiny click targets of Mac OS X, which are designed for very precise mice and trackpads, not imprecise finger tips). Scrolling through a long document using the iPad Pro touch screen is uncomfortable when it’s in laptop position. Going through a slew of new emails, likewise. In laptop mode, I want to use the keyboard for these things — and in most cases, because of bugs and/or software limitations, I can’t. That the keyboard falls short in these cases is even worse on iPad than it would be on a MacBook, because a MacBook has a trackpad. The point is, if my fingers are on the keyboard, I don’t want to move my hands. With a trackpad, I don’t have to. With the iPad Pro, I do.

It’s an ancient (meaning dating back to the Classic era) Mac convention that in a read-only scrolling view, you can use the space bar to page down. When your eyes get to the bottom of the display, you can just hit space and the view should scroll to show the next screen full of content — with the last line or two of the previous screen now repeated at the top of the new screen to provide context as your eyes move from the bottom to the top of the display. This works almost everywhere on OS X, and anywhere it doesn’t work should be considered a bug.

On iOS 9.1, Safari tries to support this, but it is dreadfully buggy. Instead of paging down just less than one screen-height of content, it pages down about 1.5 screen-heights of content. It literally scrolls right past huge amounts of content, rendering the feature completely unusable.

Here’s a sample page I’ve created to illustrate. It’s just a simple text file with 1,000 lines, numbered in order. When I view that on my MacBook Pro, I see lines 1–45 (and half of line 46). When I hit space to page, the view scrolls and I now see lines 44–89. Hit space again and the view scrolls to show lines 88–132.

On iPad Pro, I see lines 1–49 initially. But when I hit space to page down, the view scrolls to show me lines 75–123. Lines 50–74 are completely skipped past. It’s not even just a line or two — it’s huge chunks of text. This happens in all web pages in Safari on iOS 9.1, and it is not specific to the iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard. I see the exact same behavior on any iPad with a paired Bluetooth keyboard.

Mail is another app in which, on my Macs, I depend heavily on the keyboard for scrolling and selection. On iPad, Mail does let you move from message to message using the keyboard (⌘↓ and ⌘↑), but it doesn’t support scrolling the actual message content — the space bar does nothing, and the Smart Keyboard doesn’t have a proper Page Down key.

The space bar doesn’t work as a Play/Pause toggle for audio or video, either. I think it should.

I don’t think it’s inherently problematic that iOS has no conceptual support for a mouse pointer, and thus can’t work with any sort of trackpad. But, given this constraint, good support for navigating as much of the UI as possible using the keyboard is more important on the iPad than it is on the Mac. But iOS’s support for navigating using the keyboard is worse.

Another problem: when editing a long document, if you use the arrow keys to move the insertion point above the first line on screen or below the last line on screen, the insertion point just disappears off screen. The view doesn’t scroll to keep the insertion point visible, which is clearly what should happen (and does happen on OS X). Surely iOS will work this way eventually, but right now it still shows its roots as a touchscreen OS where a hardware keyboard is a decided second-class citizen.

All is not lost, however. ⌘-Tab works for app switching just like it does on the Mac. Tap it and release and you switch to the most-recently used app. Tap it and keep holding down ⌘ and you get a visual switcher showing the 10 most-recently-used apps. (Again, this works with any hardware keyboard connected to any iPad — it’s just that this has been the first time it’s been relevant to me, personally.) The Smart Keyboard lacks a Home button, but there is a system-wide shortcut that maps ⌘-Shift-H to “Home”. Not bad, but once you’re at the iOS home screen, there’s not much you can do without touching the screen. For a few days, I sort of wished that I could use the arrow keys to navigate the home screen, with the selected app icon popping “up” like in the “focus” UI of the new Apple TV. But that idea, I suspect, is too far afield from the regular touchscreen-based UI of the iOS home screen. My keyboard idea requires a select-then-act two-stage model — the regular touch-based launcher is single-stage: just tap.

But then I realized that the problem I wanted to solve wasn’t that I wanted the home screen to be keyboard-navigable. The problem was that I wanted to use the keyboard to launch apps that weren’t listed in the ⌘-Tab switcher. To do that on iOS without a hardware keyboard, you go home, then tap the app. With a keyboard, though, you can do it, just in a different way.

Hit ⌘-Space system wide, and you’ll be taken to the home screen’s system-wide “Quick Search”. It’s like the iOS equivalent of Spotlight. Start typing the name of the app you want to launch, and there it is.

But go ahead and play a sad trombone wah-wah here, because at this point, you still have to pick your arm up and touch the screen to launch the app. You can also use Quick Search for starting a web search in Safari, or anything else. But you can’t use the keyboard arrow keys to navigate the list of results. (Another problem with Quick Search using the keyboard: you have to wait a second or so for the Quick Search text field to accept input. I’m pretty sure it’s because we’re waiting for the animation to complete — first to show the home screen, then to jump to Quick Search. So if you type ⌘-Space and immediately begin typing what you’re looking for, the first few characters you type are lost. The user should never have to wait for the computer, especially if it’s just for an animation. Any Mac user with muscle memory trained by LaunchBar, Alfred, Quicksilver, or even Spotlight is going to find this enforced delay on iOS maddening.)

This lack of keyboard support is prevalent system-wide. In Messages, if you start a new conversation and type the partial name of a contact, you can’t select from the list of matches using arrow keys or auto-complete the name you’ve partially typed using Tab. You’ve got to — you guessed it — reach up and touch the screen. You can use the arrow keys to select from a list of suggestions in the recipients fields in Mail, however, and arrow keys also work for selecting from the list of suggestions in the Safari location field.

The bottom line is that the potential of the iPad Pro as a laptop is tremendous. The keyboard is just fine for typing, and the magnetic connection between the iPad Pro and the keyboard is surprisingly sturdy. You can absolutely use it as a literal laptop without any worry that the iPad Pro is going to fall off the Smart Keyboard. I even like the 4:3 aspect ratio — it shows more lines of text when reading than my 13-inch MacBook Pro. It also occupies a smaller footprint than an open MacBook Pro, meaning it should fit better on the seatback tray of an airplane. But the lack of pervasive support for keyboard-based UI navigation in iOS is a problem for anyone with longstanding Mac keyboard shortcuts ingrained in their muscle memory.

As an actual cover, the Smart Keyboard does feel thick, and when closed, it bothers me a little that it’s thicker on the outer two thirds (where the keyboard is folded under) than the inner third. I wouldn’t recommend the Smart Keyboard for anyone who doesn’t plan to actually use the keyboard quite a bit. But if you do plan on using the keyboard frequently, the trade-off in thickness (compared to the non-keyboard Smart Cover) is well worth it.

(It occurs to me that for many people, the Smart Keyboard might best be thought of not as a thick cover, but as a thin very portable desktop docking station.)

Keyboard Bugs

I experienced some flakiness with the keyboard throughout the week. Sometimes, system-wide keyboard shortcuts would stop working: ⌘-Tab, ⌘-Space, and ⌘-Shift-H. Typing within apps still worked, and keyboard shortcuts within any given app still worked, but the system-wide shortcuts inexplicably stopped working.

Less frequently, I’ve seen the opposite problem: the system-wide keyboard shortcuts work, but keyboard shortcuts within any given app stop working. (iOS 9 has a very clever feature, by the way: press and hold the ⌘ key and you’ll see a HUD pop-up displaying all keyboard shortcuts available in the current context. This makes keyboard shortcuts more discoverable than they are on the Mac, where they’re spread across multiple menus in the menu bar.)

In either case, I’ve been able to fix these keyboard problems by detaching and re-attaching the iPad from the Smart Keyboard. I don’t know if it’s a bug in iOS 9.1 or a faulty Smart Keyboard. (Apple has shipped me a second Smart Keyboard to test, but it won’t arrive until later in the day, after this review has been published. I’ll update it after the replacement arrives.)

Apple Pencil

It’s about precision: accuracy where you touch (Apple claims sub-pixel precision on screen), accuracy regarding pressure, and low latency regarding what you see on screen. I am not an illustrator, but I do know my own signature. My signature never looks like my actual signature when I have to sign electronically on a point-of-sale terminal. Usually it doesn’t even look close. On iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, it looks exactly like my signature when I sign with paper and ink. My handwriting looks like my handwriting, period (for better or for worse).

All previous iOS devices have touchscreens designed for input from one source: fingertips. Fingertips are relatively fat and capacitive. The relatively fat size and imprecise location of a finger on screen is why tap targets are relatively larger and more spaced apart on iOS than OS X. This is also why third-party styluses for iOS devices have broad tips made of capacitive rubber — they’re more or less fake fingertips. The capacitive touchscreens on iPhones and (non-Pro) iPads aren’t designed for “fine tips”.

Apple has done a few things regarding sampling the screen for input with Apple Pencil. First, there is something new in the display itself — something in the layer between the glass surface and the LCD display, I think. Or perhaps it’s under the LCD? Apple alludes to it in the Jony Ive-narrated video on the Apple Pencil web page, but they’re not really talking about it in detail.

For capacitive (finger) touch, the iPad Pro samples at twice the rate of previous iPads — 120 times per second instead of 60. With the Pencil, though, the iPad Pro samples 240 times per second. The way the Pencil works requires cooperation with the display, and so there’s no way this Pencil could be made to work with existing iPads. The Pencil is not iPad Pro-exclusive out of product marketing spite — it’s exclusive to the Pro because the two were engineered in coordination with each other. And if Apple had designed the Pencil differently, to allow it to work with existing iPads, there’s no way it could have had this level of accuracy, because the tip would have needed to be broader and capacitive. (The Pencil’s tip is not capacitive at all — it doesn’t register as a touch at all on any other iOS device.)

My guess is we’ll start to see Pencil support in future iOS devices in addition to the iPad Pro, starting with the iPad Air 3.

Because the Pencil is round-barreled and has no clip on the cap, I was worried that it would roll around (and eventually, off) a table top. But it’s actually weighted inside, sort of like a Weeble Wobble, so unless it’s on a sloped surface, it won’t roll more than an inch or so before settling in place. In hand, I can’t tell that it’s weighted like this.

I think most people who buy an iPad Pro are going to want a Smart Keyboard. The Apple Pencil is the more technically remarkable peripheral, but I suspect it’ll prove useful to far fewer people. Sketching apps like 53’s Paper and Apple’s own built-in Notes app certainly have appeal and utility to people who aren’t artists, but I suspect a lot of Apple Pencils are going to be bought out of curiosity and then go largely unused.

For actual illustrators and artists, however, the Pencil and iPad Pro seem poised to be a career/industry-changing combination. What has been largely abstract — drawing using a device over here, looking at the results on a screen over there — can now be direct.

Miscellaneous

• Weight: The iPad Pro certainly feels heavier than recent iPads, but only in a way that’s commensurate with its increased size. It’s not too heavy.

• Audio: The speakers are surprisingly loud. Apple told me the iPad Pro produces three times the audio volume of the iPad Air, and that certainly matches my experience. If you use your iPad as a small TV, the audio improvements might be more meaningful than the bigger display. The four-speaker stereo system is also very clever — no matter which way you rotate the iPad Pro, the top two speakers are for treble and the bottom two for bass.

• Snap: Speaking of audio, if there’s a downside to the snug connection between the iPad Pro and the Smart Keyboard, it’s that the magnetic connection makes a rather loud snap when you connect or disconnect it. I can imagine some scenarios — in bed with a sleeping spouse, say — where this might be a problem.

• Size classes: I think even Apple’s own apps are still figuring out how best to arrange layouts on this larger display. For example, in Mail, when the iPad Pro is in portrait, it only shows one column at a time. I think there’s clearly enough room horizontally, even in portrait, for a two-pane layout (narrow list of messages on left, wide message detail on right). The iPad Pro in portrait is as wide as the iPad Air in landscape — and the iPad Air in landscape uses two panes for Mail. Third-party developers are going to want to adjust their apps after they get a feel for what it’s like to use the iPad Pro for real.

• Battery life: Simply outstanding. I didn’t even plug it in once between Monday and Friday, and it still had plenty of charge left. I’ve been using it for eight continuous hours as I type this sentence, and it still has more than a 50 percent charge remaining.

• Missing apps: It’s been like this ever since the original iPad, but it still strikes me as odd that the iPad version of iOS lacks the Calculator, Weather, and Stocks apps. The Mac doesn’t have “apps” for Weather or Stocks, but it does have widgets for them in Notification Center. And it seems downright crazy for a computer not to have a built-in means for doing arithmetic. (Although you can do some arithmetic using Quick Search.)

• Touch, Don’t Touch: For the past week I’ve really only used two computers. The iMac on my desk, and this iPad Pro. Today, though, I used my MacBook Pro while the iPad Pro was running benchmarks. And within a few minutes, I did something I have never once done before: I reached up and tried to touch something on the display. Ten minutes later I did it again. I point this out not to argue that I think MacBooks should have touch screens, but simply as an observation that even a lifelong Mac user can quickly get accustomed to the iPad Pro as a laptop.

Conclusion

From a hardware perspective, the iPad Pro strikes me as a seminal device. It runs faster than the Intel x86-based MacBooks, gets better battery life, and costs significantly less. And it has a better display with significantly more pixels than even a 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Software-wise, support for the Smart Keyboard needs to get even smarter — but I’d be shocked if it doesn’t. For me, the iPad Pro marks the turning point where iPads are no longer merely lightweight (both physically and conceptually) alternatives to MacBooks for use in simple scenarios, to where MacBooks will now start being seen as heavyweight alternatives to iPads for complex scenarios.²

Is it a MacBook replacement for me, personally? No. For you? Maybe. For many people? Yes.

It brings me no joy to observe this, but the future of mass market portable computing involves neither a mouse pointer nor an x86 processor. ★