Recent updates to the iPad seek to revitalize its sales, but global preference leans firmly toward smartphones, according to the latest market studies.
When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPad 14 years ago, he said there was a place for a third device that sat between a laptop and a smartphone, as long as that intermediate gadget did some essential tasks better than each of the others.
For some of you, the iPad is exactly that. It’s more convenient than a phone or computer for watching YouTube videos, sending an email, or distracting the kids.
On Tuesday, Apple presented updated iPad models with which it hopes to revive its sagging sales. The company also boasted about its artificial intelligence capabilities, an area where the company is under pressure to prove itself.
But the iPad has not spread as much as computers and, above all, smartphones. As the iPhone and other smartphones became more capable, larger, and ubiquitous around the world, they made the iPad irrelevant.
Many of you love your iPads. Gorgeous. Even technology that does not reach its expected potential can still be useful. The device may have changed your habits, but neither it nor other tablets have had a broad impact.
The story of the section shows that technology founders like Jobs, revered for seeing the future, sometimes get it wrong. It’s a useful lesson when executives like Elon Musk or OpenAI’s Sam Altman make predictions about the future of transportation or AI.
Months after the iPad debuted in 2010, Jobs made an analogy to cars and trucks.
Personal computers, he said in an interview, would continue to be useful to many people, but would become increasingly niche, as trucks became once Americans moved to cities and fewer people needed a work vehicle at work. The farms.
(Jobs probably wasn’t referring to light trucks like the pickup trucks and SUVs that dominate the U.S. consumer vehicle market.)
The visionary said that it was difficult to predict the future, but he believed that the iPad could become a mass consumption device, like cars were for personal transportation. But not so much.
Smartphones, including your own iPhone, have become the way billions of people connect to the Internet and browse, talk, read, watch, listen and socialize.
The smartphone is the car. The laptop and the iPad are more like trucks. You can see it in the figures.
About 1.1 billion new smartphones are sold worldwide every year. About 260 million computers were sold last year, according to research company IDC. Nearly 130 million iPads and other tablets will be sold in 2023, according to IDC estimates.
IDC research director Jitesh Ubrani said that, thanks to a pandemic-related iPad buying binge – which also affected computers – there are slightly more people with the devices today than when sales of New ones peaked a decade ago.
Still, billions of people use smartphones. At most, a couple hundred million people have an iPad. IDC expects the number of tablet users to increase slightly at most.
Walt Mossberg, the pioneering personal technology journalist who worked for the Wall Street Journal and Recode, told me that the best way to measure the iPad’s impact is by stealing time that people, including him, would have spent on laptops.
(Mossberg and Kara Swisher starred in the 2010 interview in which Jobs made the car-truck analogy.)
Mossberg said that long before he retired from his day job in 2017, he preferred his iPad for many tasks other than note-taking and writing. He estimated that he used his laptop at least 50% less thanks to his iPad.
Still, Mossberg said, the smartphone is “the true personal computer” for him and the world.
He estimates he uses his Mac laptop a couple of times a week, his iPad a couple of times a day, and his iPhone many times a day. He used his iPhone to send me an email while waiting for a doctor’s appointment.
Steve Jobs’ failed prediction about iPads seems relevant now, as technologists bet that AI will turn the smartphone into a more niche device.
Altman is one of the people who believe that smartphones will be used less and more tasks will be left in the hands of voice assistants specialized in AI on devices that will be worn like glasses or brooches.
We’ll see. I find it instructive that Jobs did not say in that 2010 interview what became true: that the smartphone – and not the iPad or the laptop – became the first computer used by billions of people.
That calls for all of us to be careful when predicting what the next technological success or niche could be.
The Washington Post
Shira Ovide writes The Washington Post’s The Tech Friend, a newsletter about making technology a force for good. She has been a technology journalist for more than a decade and wrote a technology newsletter for the New York Times.