Wednesday, April 21, 2021
This article was first presented in Yahoo Finance Tech, a weekly newsletter that highlights our original industry content. Receive it directly in your inbox every Wednesday until 16:00 ET. Sign up
Apple’s iPad pros are as powerful as the MacBook Air. That could be a problem.
Apple (AAPL) has positioned the iPad Pro as a computer replacement since its launch in 2015, when CEO Tim Cook said that iPads will make notebooks or desktops useless to “many, many people. ”.
And the latest models, which debuted on Tuesday, seem to do just that – but the problem for Apple is that they’re replacing their own MacBook Air. In an ideal world, Apple would like consumers to buy an iPad in addition to its laptop, not a MacBook.
The catalyst for the iPad’s new position as a competitor to the MacBook Air? Apple’s new M1 chip. Until last year, Apple used pumped versions of the chips on its iPhones in the iPad Pro. That changed with the announcements on Tuesday, when Apple said that its latest professionals will present exactly the same M1 chip found in the MacBook Air. This, along with the fact that Apple is working to ensure that iOS and iPadOS applications can run on MacOS, means that the gap between the iPad Pro and MacBook Air is closing quickly.
Certainly, a few differences differentiate the two products at the moment, such as the fact that the iPad Pro cannot run all MacOS applications. “The positioning of the iPad and Mac is a little different at the moment,” Gartner research director Mikako Kitagawa told Yahoo Finance. “But in the future, I don’t know how it will work, especially using the same processors [central processing units]. ”
Your next laptop could be an iPad
Apple’s new iPads could become game changers for a small reason – they’re packed with M1 chips, the replacement for the Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) processor technology giant they’ve used in Mac products for years . Apple produced its own ARM-based M1 processors, he says, because Intel chips simply couldn’t support the kind of performance and design changes needed for its devices.
The first M1 device I tried, the MacBook Pro, blew me away in terms of battery power and life, a rarity for a first-generation device. But unlike the new gorgeous Apple iMacs that were built around the M1, the MacBook Pro hasn’t 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] saying, “Hey, we’re going aggressive on custom silicon. This is our way of differentiating, ”Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, told Yahoo Finance. “And this is a serious glove they’ve thrown away, and I think it’s going to make it very difficult for other suppliers to compete with them.”
Sure, the iPad Pro hasn’t undergone any exterior design changes either, but it’s not like Apple could make the product thinner than it already is.
With the M1, the iPad Pro receives the same 8-core processor, 8-core GPU and 16-core neural engine as the MacBook Air. Like the Air, the iPad Pro has up to 2 TB of storage. It also has a Thunderbolt USB-C port that allows you to connect your 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 improved connectivity, and unlike the MacBook Air, the iPad Pro gets optional built-in 5G.
Oh, and did I mention that the iPad Pro also benefits from wide-angle and ultra-wide cameras? These tablets are clearly meant to exceed even the capabilities of the MacBook Air.
“Over the past two years, the iPad Pro has slowly taken over some of the MacBook Air,” Gene Munster told Loup Ventures for Yahoo Finance. “We expect this trend to continue with the latest changes to the iPad Pro. Finally it is a little more expensive than Air and more versatile. ”
Yes, there are some key differences between the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air. Both the 11-inch and 12.9-inch Pro models require separate keyboards and mice to function like real laptops. And with the 11-inch iPad Pro starting at $ 799 and with a Magic keyboard and a Magic Mouse priced at $ 159 and $ 79, respectively, the total price for turning the 11-inch model into a full laptop is $ 1,037.
Meanwhile, the 12.9-inch model starts at $ 1,099, while its magic keyboard with built-in trackpad costs $ 349, bringing its price to $ 1,448. It’s a good deal more than it will cost you $ 999 based on your MacBook Air.
But the Pro boasts features that the MacBook Air doesn’t have, including touch screens that you can type in and draw new FaceTime cameras that follow you as you move through video calls.
Then there’s the new 12.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR screen of the iPad Pro. With 10,000 mini LEDs, far more than the 72 full-size LEDs of the previous generation iPad Pro and 2,500 dimming areas, the 12.9-inch Pro screen is the kind of display you’ll find on a state-of-the-art TV. Only those features are worth the price difference between iPad Pro and MacBook Air.
Moreover, the iPad Pro can be used as more than a laptop. Without a keyboard or mouse, it’s still an incredibly capable tablet that you can use lying in bed or sitting on the couch.
There is an obstacle in the way
An important factor prevents the iPad Pro and MacBook Air from being direct competitors: the Apple macOS. The operating system that powers Apple’s line of Mac laptops and desktops doesn’t work on iOS or iPadOS, so while you can use iPadOS and iOS apps on your Apple Mac, you can’t use MacOS apps on iPad Pro.
However, this could change, as the new iPad Pro runs on the same chips as the current generation MacBook Airs, MacBook Pro, Mac minis and now iMacs. In other words, it wouldn’t be a huge leap for Apple to run MacOS on an iPad Pro.
Even though Apple doesn’t put MacOS apps on the iPad Pro, most programs that people run, such as Slack, Microsoft Office, Google Drive, Spotify, and more, are already available on the iPadOS. The M1 chip will simply improve overall performance.
Of course, Apple needs to keep its product lines separate. The company makes more money from selling both the Mac and the iPad than on any of the product segments. In the first quarter of 2021, for example, Apple sold $ 8.6 billion worth of Macs and $ 8.4 billion worth of iPads.
“They don’t want to combine Mac and iPad together to sell just one device,” Kitagawa said. “Because by doing this, you will lose the opportunity to sell hardware.”
And that would affect Apple’s results.