The Last Thing the iPad Needs Is a Spec Bump

An anonymous reader shares a column: When Apple CEO Tim Cook and a bunch of his deputies take the virtual stage next week to announce new iPads, they're going to spend a lot of time talking about specs. If the rumors are true, we're going to get new iPad Pros with OLED screens and thinner bodies, new Airs with faster chips and a correctly placed front camera, and a couple of new accessories. Before they even launch, I feel confident telling you these are the best iPads ever. But after all these years, I still don't know how to tell you whether you should want an iPad. Or what you'd want to do with it.

This has been true forever, of course. The iPad is the jack-of-all-trades in Apple's lineup, a terrific device in many ways that still feels increasingly redundant now that so many people have big phones and long-lasting laptops. Apple seems to have spent the last decade-plus enamored with the idea of the iPad as a shapeshifter -- a device that can be exactly what you need at any given time. The company loves that the iPad's use case is hard to pin down, that it means different things to different people. It's a fun, good, ambitious idea: The One Gadget To Rule Them All. The way to make that happen, though, is not to upgrade the chips or move the buttons or redesign the rounded corners. It's to focus less on the iPad itself and more on the things you attach to it.

The iPad is a screen and a processor, and everything else should be an add-on for whenever you need it. Give the gamers a controller and an external GPU. Give the music lovers a speaker dock, and give the smart home fanatics a bunch of buttons that connect to various devices. The photographers need lenses; the spreadsheeters need a keyboard with function keys. The Pencil and the Magic Keyboard are a start, but Apple needs to do much more. The company needs to spend less time worrying about the iPad itself -- a device famous for how long it lasts and that hardly anyone is using to its full potential -- and more time on how to make it more than just a tablet. (Plus, bonus for Apple: it's going to be a lot easier to get people to buy accessories than to convince them to upgrade their iPad when they don't need to.)

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