It was thought that people would read about iPad and instead it happened that people read about iPhone and on large format smartphones. It used to be thought that people would watch movies and TV series on the iPad but it just so happens that people watch them on the iPhone or on TVs connected to the Internet. It was thought that the iPad would revolutionize the world of information and books and instead they were to revolutionize it Facebook and Amazon. It used to be thought that commuters would immerse themselves in their tablets on commute to and from work and instead stick their heads in their smartphones, increasingly ubiquitous in train compartments and even on the street.
I myself, when the iPad came out, thought of doing everything on the tablet and getting a 25 euro Nokia for phone calls. Instead it happened that I do everything on the iPhone and use the iPad to read the newspaper in the evening before going to bed. At first I changed the iPad every year and now I always have the one I bought in 2014. That's enough for me.
The iPad pro was supposed to compete with laptops and eventually take their place in the workplace and in the professions; an idea, moreover, shared by the former arch-rival Microsoft who, with its Surface, was the first to set itself on this collision course with ultra-thin laptops. Now it happened that the new boss of Microsoft, Satya Nadella is putting the Surface in the attic, repositioning it towards a premium user with special needs. It's like saying it will go the way of the Microsoft Phone.
Also in this segment of the market the ipad pro is stalled. Professionals continue to prefer the ultra-thin and Apple, which had positioned its MacBooks in an ever higher price range to make room for the iPad pro, is now backtracking and there is talk of new models that should return to a reasonably priced, that of the iPad pro, in fact.
Apple has sold about 400 million iPads since its introduction in 2010; a considerable number, but stagnant and even declining since 2013. In the same period of time it has placed one and a half billion iPhones in the hands of its customers.
The best thing that can be said about the iPad experience is that it fell short of its original expectations. But while the iPad has fallen short of Apple's expectations, it has played an important role in forging the mindset of the new media ecosystem. As Steve Job often said, it often happens that you design a product which then takes you to a completely different place than the original thought.
Now difficult not to agree with Jan Dawson, lead analyst at Jackdaw Research, when he accompanied the iPad with these words: “The role of the iPad is probably more vague than that of any other Apple product. It's not well defined at all."
The siren of the iPad
It was precisely the information and publishing operators who spent a lot of time behind the iPad, that is, the cultural industry sector that had claimed it as the panacea in the face of the disruptive action of their business model implemented by Amazon and from the free web. Publishers saw in the iPad the opportunity to reshape their content offer by combining, thanks to this revolutionary new device, the best of the world of print and the web. The first to adhere to the Jobsian concept of revolutionary device was Rupert Murdoch who created a real newspaper, The Daily, released exclusively on the iPad.
Other Apple media partners invested time, manpower, and money building products for the iPad. Esquire, Fortune, Better Homes and Gardens teamed up to sell a Netflix-like subscription to dozens of iPad-based titles and magazines. Apple built a special area of the AppStore — “Edicola” (Newsstand) -, later abandoned, to collect all the information on offer for its mobile devices.
Book publishers began to publish new versions of digital books, also in the form of applications, which included multimedia content capable of making the most of the iPad's potential. The books category of the AppStore at one point contained more products than any other category except video games. iBookstore, the book store launched by Apple together with the iPad, at a certain point was inundated with products of this nature for the development of which Apple had prepared very sophisticated tools compared to those made available by the competition, namely Amazon.
At one point, at the end of 2012, Apple even thought about bringing textbooks to the iPad, setting up a development tool to create tailor-made interactive textbooks for the iPad. An initiative which, this time, however, was snubbed by the big publishers who control the school market, a high-margin sector which they intend to control by any means. Just three years after its launch, the iPad had come full circle and sales stagnated from there.
The time lost by publishers
The majority of these attempts soon proved to be flops especially when related to the expectations and the promise that the iPad would change the world of information and publishing. Something that didn't happen and that helped sidetrack the traditional media's effort to build a sustainable digital business. If publishers, instead of chasing the promises of the iPad, had implemented a different set of priorities focusing, for example, on Facebook, video, smartphones, podcasts and other promising areas of digital media, perhaps today they would be in a most advanced point of their transition to new media.
In a recent interview David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines with a past at the top of Condeé Nast, declared “The scenario was this then: we all thought that the iPad was the dominant device and it so happened that the iPhone was the dominant device, the big screen iPhone”.
It took some time for the publishing world to recognize that content consumption today is smartphone-centric or iPhone-centric and, I might add, that it is tele-centric. Everything in between has a marginal or ancillary role. And the iPad is in the middle, it's suspended in mid-air. But from there you can see a beautiful panorama.
The device-centrism of the "old" Apple
The iPad-centric approach cost Apple the educational market, an important area of its business to which Jobs himself had always watched with great attention and concern. Google has stolen the educational market from Apple with its low-priced Cromebooks and the suite of services and applications that schools can acquire with a modest investment. In 2014 the iPad had 26% of the US school market versus the Cromebook's 38% and Microsoft's 25%. At the end of 2017 the situation had completely changed: iPad 12%, Microsoft 22% and Cromebook 60%. The iPad has given up half of its market share to Google. A rather clear signal that Apple has interpreted merely in terms of price.
On March 26 in a Chicago high school, Apple management, led by Tim Cook, presented the new Apple solution for the school market… And this solution is still, sadly, iPad-centric, device-centric. Along with a $299 iPad ($359 with stylus) Apple has come up with a suite of very interesting and advanced applications that might just be what the school needs.
Among these is SchoolWork which allows teachers to organize and monitor class work in a simple and direct way. The app is accompanied by a tool, ClassService, which allows developers to create ancillary and support applications to SchoolWork, which can therefore be customized according to the teaching and organizational needs of the teacher and his class. The Cook team also showed a brand new "Everyone can Create" tool to create assisted, visual and shared multimedia and interactive content that can replace the "ancient" handouts or equally "ancient" research.
What's the problem? It all starts and ends with the iPad. The services and contents produced by the Apple suite are accessible only from the iPad, all other devices are excluded. How can a school, i.e. an organization that is accountable to many stakeholders including families (who are terrible), tie into an exclusive program of that kind? He can not!
Yet Apple had already received a rather severe lesson from the school world in 2012. In New York, with great fanfare and within a specific event, Eddy Cue, one of Jobs' closest and most trusted collaborators, presented iBooks Author , an application for creating digital content, in the form of e-books that would find their place in a specific area of the iBookstore. The application itself was the state of the art for the creation of highly interactive digital books, textbooks and manuals. These digital books could be created without the help of developers, much like creating a document in a word processor. Eventually the authoring system produced a standard HTM5 ePub file with the exception of a few lines of code that limited its use. Those few lines of code ruined everything.
What was the problem? That these ebooks could only be read on the iPad. For this reason, this highly valuable application that really could have started something important was snubbed by schools and flatly ignored by educational publishers who had no intention of investing in something controlled entirely by a single platform. iBooks Author, which could have been an app for anyone who wanted to make an ebook, was in fact aimed only at iPad owners, a modest cluster of the market. It is therefore natural that it turned into a flop and did not help the relaunch of the iPad. However, the lesson was not learned by Apple and today, 6 years later, we are back to square one. Frustrating! But this is the old Apple, because now there is a new one.
The content and the "new" Apple
The alternative to autarkic device-centrism like the one pompously celebrated in Chicago already exists and we are beginning to see something significant. Tim Cook never misses an opportunity to remind analysts and the public that Apple is rapidly transforming itself into a media and content company and that it shouldn't be evaluated and judged solely by the hardware it produces. In fact, Apple makes nearly $10 billion in content; the turnover of a company that can easily fit into the Fortune 500 list.
Now the choices for the educational market blatantly contradict this vision and take us back to the Apple time machine of 2012. Something more in line with the new Apple could have been presented, i.e. the Apple that presents itself to the public more as a media company than as a company that builds devices, albeit of great appeal. Where the device does not arrive, the content can arrive, and this area is precisely the school. It can really be a deadly relay, but everyone has to run their own path independently.
In this new Apple, the service and the content is no longer ancillary to the device, it is no longer conceived as a function of the device, but impacts the user as content or service in itself.
An example? Apple is investing heavily in the production of television originals (we are talking about a few billion dollars) and is opening a new operational headquarters in Culver City, Los Angeles (in what used to be the HBO headquarters, so the air is good!) and a large studio a short distance from that.
Now the originals produced by this Apple team can be watched on iPads, but they can also be viewed on all other devices — from hundreds of different manufacturers — if equipped with an Internet connection. Content cannot be encapsulated in a device or in a given distribution system, it must be able to reach all potential users regardless of the means they use to access it. This is the path that Apple must take, extending this approach to all its activities beyond the reach of its devices. School included. An ebook created with the "Eberybody can create" app must be able to be shared and downloaded from all devices because it is encoded in a standard language, as it actually already is. Just remove two lines of code and it's done.
The beauty of the iPad
If the iPad as a device has shown its limits and device-centrism is becoming a ball and chain, the contribution that this experience has given to the media industry certainly cannot be underestimated. All the principles of which it has made itself a vehicle and which make up its DNA are extremely topical today. Furthermore, the iPad has been a huge training ground for the media industry and the only system to have penetrated deeply into the mindset and action of traditional media groups.
The iPad academy is forging a new sensibility about digital media. That content must be paid for, that it must have a minimum of decency before reaching the general public, that there is respect for customer privacy which cannot be treated as a commodity, that quality trumps quantity, that the user who buys and the author who creates enjoy a protection and guarantee network for their investment, that copyright is not a fig leaf are all hot spots in the public conversation on digital media today. They are also the agenda that cannot be ignored in a scenario that sees the hegemony of this means of destruction in the cultural industry. The iPad has inoculated this culture and has already made it a vehicle in unsuspecting years.
What is required of Apple today is only a small effort compared to the immense one it has already made: eliminating three lines of code from its intangible products. It is the same operation that Amazon must do with its ebooks.
One small step for them, one giant leap for us.
