Former Apple Ex Jean-Louis Gassée: To Survive, The iPad Will Have To Become More Mac-Like

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Wall Street consensus is that when Apple announces its Q2 2014 quarterly earnings on Wednesday, Apple’s year-over-year iPad numbers won’t look good. On the low end, at least one Wall Street analyst says that Apple will have sold 23% fewer iPads this year than last year in the same quarter; on average, Wall Street expects Apple’s iPad sales to have declined 0.7% year-over-year.

How can this be? This is the year that Apple unveiled the Retina iPad mini and the beautifully redesigned iPad Air, after all. How is it possible that these iPads can be selling worse than the inferior iPads a year ago?

Ex-Apple exec Jean-Louie Gassée has a theory, and it’s not one that Apple fans are going to be happy to hear: the iPad is a big tease, and fundamentally less useful than both a smartphone or a laptop.

According to Gassée, sales are stalling because the iPad’s “meteoric debut raised expectations that it can’t currently meet.” The problem, he says, is the fact that the iPad is positioned between a smartphone and a laptop, but no one is clear, even four years later, what this actually means. There’s an exception to every rule, but most people can’t seriously do any productivity tasks on an iPad.

Gassée says this is going to have to change. It’s going to have to become more MacBook-like:

The iPad represents about 20% of Apple’s revenue; allowing iPad numbers to plummet isn’t acceptable. So far, Apple’s bet has been to keep the iPad simple, rigidly so perhaps, rather than creating a neither-nor product: No longer charmingly simple, but not powerful enough for real productivity tasks. But if the iPad wants to cannibalize more of the PC market, it will have to remove a few walls.

Specifically, the iPad is a computer, it has a file system, directories, and the like — why hide these “details” from users? Why prevent us from hunting around for the bits and bobs we need to assemble a brochure or a trip itinerary?

What do you think? Would you like a more MacBook-like iPad, or is Gassée full of it? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Monday Note

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