Wednesday 21 April 2021
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Apple’s iPad Pros are just as powerful as the MacBook Air. This can be a problem.
Apple (AAPL) has positioned the iPad Pro as a computer replacement since its launch in 2015, when CEO Tim Cook said iPads would make notebooks or desktops unnecessary for ‘many, many people’.
And the latest models, which launched on Tuesday, apparently did exactly that – but the problem for Apple is that they are replacing its own MacBook Air. In an ideal world, Apple wants consumers to buy an iPad in addition to the laptop, not the MacBook.
The catalyst for iPad’s new position as a MacBook Air competitor? Apple’s new M1 chip. Until last year, Apple used inflated versions of the slides of its iPhones in its iPad pros. That changed with Tuesday’s announcements, when Apple said that its latest Pros would contain exactly the same M1 chip found in the MacBook Air. This, coupled with the fact that Apple is working to ensure that iOS and iPadOS apps can work on MacOS, means that the gap between the iPad Pro and MacBook Air is rapidly closing.
To be sure, the two products distinguish a few differences for now, such as the fact that the iPad Pro cannot run all MacOS applications. “The position of the iPad and the Mac is currently a bit different,” Mikarto Kitagawa, Gartner’s research director, told Yahoo Finance. ‘But in the future I do not know how it will go, especially not with the same processors [central processing units]. ”
Your next laptop may be an iPad
Apple’s new iPads could become game changers for one small reason – they’re full of M1 chips, the tech giant’s replacement for the Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) processors that have been using them in Mac products for years. Apple made its own ARM-based M1 processors, it says, because Intel’s chips just could not handle the kind of performance and design changes its devices required.
The first M1 device I tried, the MacBook Pro, blew me away in terms of power and battery life, which is a rarity for a first generation device. But unlike Apple’s beautiful new iMacs, built around the M1, the MacBook Pro has not changed much on the outside. It was almost as if Apple was using it as a test bed for the new processor.
‘For the whole industry, [Apple is] and said, ‘Hey, we’re moving aggressively with custom silicone. “This is our way of distinguishing,” Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, told Yahoo Finance. “And it’s a serious glove that they dropped, and I think it’s going to make it very challenging for other suppliers to compete with them.”
Of course, the iPad Pro also didn’t get any design changes from the outside, but it’s not as if Apple can make the product thinner than it already is.
With the M1, the iPad Pro gets the same 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU and 16-core neural engine as the MacBook Air. Just like the Air, the iPad Pro can get 2 TB of storage. It also gets a USB-C Thunderbolt port that allows you to connect the tablet to a secondary monitor with resolutions up to 6K and transfer data at much faster speeds than standard USB-C connections. There’s also WiFi 6 for enhanced connectivity, and unlike the MacBook Air, the iPad Pro gets optional built-in 5G.
Oh, and did I mention that the iPad pros also get wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle cameras? These tablets are clearly meant to go even further than the capabilities of the MacBook Air.
“Over the past two years, iPad Pro has been slowly participating in MacBook Air,” Goup Munster, Loup Ventures, told Yahoo Finance. ‘We expect the trend to continue with the latest iPad Pro changes. In the end, it is slightly more expensive than the Air and more versatile. ”
Yes, there are still some major differences between the iPad Pro and MacBook Air. Both the Pro’s 11-inch and 12.9-inch models require separate keyboards and mice to function as true laptops. And with the 11-inch iPad Pro starting at $ 799 and a Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse, which cost $ 159 and $ 79 respectively, the total price to make the 11-inch model a full laptop is $ 1,037.
The 12.9-inch model, meanwhile, starts at $ 1,099, while its Magic Keyboard with a built-in trackpad costs $ 349, raising the price to $ 1,448. That’s well over $ 999 per MacBook Air for you.
But the benefits boast features that the MacBook Air does not include, including touch screens for writing and drawing, and new FaceTime cameras to follow as you move during video calls.
Then there’s the 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s new Liquid Retina XDR screen. The 12.9-inch Pro screen contains 10,000 mini-LEDs, far more than the 72 Full-LEDs of the previous generation of the iPad Pro, and 2500 dimming zones. The 12.9-inch Pro screen is the kind of screen you can see on a high-definition TV. These features alone are worth the price difference between the iPad Pro and MacBook Air.
What’s more, the iPad Pro can be used as more than a laptop. Without a keyboard or mouse, it is still an incredibly capable tablet with which you can lie in bed or sit on the couch.
There is one roadblock in the road
One big factor is that the iPad Pro and MacBook Air are not direct competitors: Apple’s MacOS. The operating system that powers Apple’s Mac series of laptops and desktops does not work on iOS or iPadOS, so although you can use iPadOS and iOS applications on Apple’s Mac, you can not use MacOS applications on the iPad Pro .
However, that may change as the new iPad Pros work on the same chips as the current generation MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, Mac minis and now iMacs. In other words, it would not be a big leap for Apple to run MacOS on an iPad Pro.
Even if Apple does not place MacOS applications on iPad Pro, the majority of the applications that people run, such as Slack, Microsoft Office, Google Drive applications, Spotify and others, are already available on iPadOS. The M1 chip will simply improve the overall performance.
Of course, Apple needs to keep its product lines separate. The company makes more money selling both the Mac and iPad than just one of the products. In Q1 2021, for example, Apple sold $ 8.6 billion Macs and $ 8.4 billion iPads.
“They do not want to combine Mac and iPad to sell just one device,” Kitagawa said. “Because you do, you lose the opportunity to sell hardware.”
And that would hurt Apple’s conclusion.