Mark Gurman’s last minute “maybe an M4…” rumour turned out to be absolutely correct.
No one would have batted an eyelid had the company gone with an M3. Instead it chose to skip a generation and bring a new generation of its processors to the iPad before the Mac. The unanswered question (so far) is why?
My gut feeling is there are several drivers for this decision. First, it allows TSMC, who will be manufacturing the M4, to start with relatively small volumes. iPad’s sell well: iPad Pros, on the other hand, are a smaller part of the mix, and probably lower volumes than the MacBook Air or low-end MacBook Pros, which would have been the other option for a new chip.
Second, there is probably a performance price to be paid for that “tandem OLED” screen. Tandem OLED, by the way, is not a new thing. As reported by The Elec back in 2022, it looks like Samsung could be the manufacturer although LG Display also makes tandem OLED, mostly for the automotive market. In addition to brightness, tandem OLED gives increased lifespan and better burn-in resistance, both of which are important with a device that’s designed to be used for long periods of time.
But third is the marketing factor: by putting M4 first in the iPad, it shows that the iPad is still an important platform for the company.
One small point of note: Apple talks about M4 having “up to 10 cores”, but some models have less. The iPad Pros which have less than 1Tb of storage use a nine-core M4, and get 8Gb of RAM rather than the 16Gb of the high-end models.
This makes sense, because those iPad Pros with 1-2Tb of storage are going to be bought either to do video or because the customer has a stupid amount of money and wants “the best”. But Apple is not particularly transparent about this: go to order, and you won’t find a mention of the difference.
Of course there’s a new Apple Pencil Pro, but the second generation Apple Pencil, which a lot of current Pro owners will have, doesn’t work with it (the lower cost USB-C variant does). That means an even more expensive upgrade for existing users, who will also need to buy a new Magic Keyboard.
More importantly than the cost, Apple had a chance here to make a point that the iPad’s modular nature means you don’t have to throw away your accessories every time you upgrade. It chose not to do that, and that’s disappointing.
Another trick that Apple has missed is not improving the battery life, which remains at the usual “ten hours” or “all day battery”. And it’s not that iPad is bad on this score. But the Mac is now so much improved that it’s no longer the go-to device if you want something which is going to reduce your charging anxiety to nothing.
I’ve said it many times now, but the M2 MacBook Air has been a revelation. It turns my computer from being something where I needed to ensure I had a charger with me to a device that gets charged overnight, like my phone. For someone whose first laptop got a couple of hours that is a huge mental shift, so much so that it took me a while to racing to the nearest wall socket once I saw the battery monitor drop down to 50%.
Battery life is the biggest factor which keeps me using the Mac right now. The iPad should get the same length of use, and it just doesn’t.
The iPad Pro’s place in the universe
For a lot of us, technology is as much a hobby and a passion as a tool. We love computers because we love them as objects, not just because of what they allow us to do. I fell in love with the iPad in this way from the first day I got my hands on one, in a car park in Basingstoke where I bought a first generation one for cash from a guy who had just come back from a US trip, before they were released in the UK.
Apple often talks in a way which makes my marketing-cynical eyes roll, but its description of the iPad as a “magical sheet of glass” is, to me, real. A computer that’s just a piece of glass, that you can use as a slate when you want, as a creative powerhouse, as a book, as a TV, and that is capable of transforming its physical form by use of accessories to do all those things well – that’s something amazing.
The iPad should be that one device but somehow, 14 years down the line, it’s still not. My gut feeling is this comes down to the restrictions which Apple continues to place on what developers (and customers!) can do with it compared to the Mac or any real computer. All of the arguments people make about customer benefits to a locked-down ecosystem don’t apply to a computer which is designed to be your main device.
About that ad
I don’t think I have ever known Apple apologise for an ad before. It has quietly withdrawn them (including the What’s a computer? iPad ad, which I liked but you won’t find now on an Apple channel), and it has had duffers that it would rather people didn’t remember.
Like John Gruber, I didn’t really think it was that bad on first viewing, although it did strike me as pretty tone deaf. It definitely didn’t get the message across, which was that the iPad can be all these wonderful creative things. Instead, it focused on the destruction of creative things, which isn’t “at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts” at all.
But thinking about it more, Apple should have predicted the reaction to it. It isn’t the plucky underdog anymore: it’s one of the biggest technology companies in the world, and people are (justifiably in my view) wary of it because of that. Where perhaps 10 years ago people would take its environmental claims at face value and believe it’s control freakery was down to a desire to deliver the best experience for customers, now less people want to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Including, of course, me.
