by Jean-Louis Gassée

Once more, with feeling… Apple keeps saying that the iPad is the best incarnation of its vision for the future of personal computing. With iPadOS, we come close to a muscular alternative to conventional personal computers — but an important feature is missing: Discoverability.

In the words of Computer Science sage Alan Kay, and with apologies for possibly misremembering his metaphor, upon uttering a simple “open sesame” a well-designed product should tell you what it does and how it works. With a great product, the inventor is there with you, guiding your feet through a veritable Ali Baba’s Cave of riches that had been reserved for priests and royalty.

The original Macintosh is a good example of great product. The mouse pointing device took seconds to understand and just few more as it grew buttons and a wheel. Technopriests argued, perhaps “correctly”, that they could do more with the Command Line, but the Mac’s graphical user interface, with its pull-down menus and movable windows, gave the Rest of Us a power we’d never known, it did more — and did it better — than we initially perceived.

(Come to think of it, Kay’s words apply to more than just computer hardware and software. Does your car dashboard, home entertainment controls, or even an Apple store make you feel invited, smart, and powerful from the get-go?)

Twenty-seven years later, in January 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the first successful tablet computer, the iPad. Ignoring the naysayers, a new Rest of Us population took to the device. The iPad answered the prayers of many: A fun, self-contained computer you could drive with your index finger.

Sales skyrocketed to 26M units during the 2013 Xmas quarter but then started to go south. Three years later, reality — and word of mouth — set in and iPad sales crashed to 13.02M units in the 2016 Xmas quarter, down 50%. Sales rebounded a bit in 2017 but stayed flatish in 2018, the last year for which Apple reported unit sales:

The most natural explanation for the decline is that the iPad failed to fulfill initial expectations that it would be a general-purpose device that could replace our Macs and PCs. Perhaps this expectation was naïve, but Apple’s posturing didn’t help. Tim Cook insisted that the iPad represented “the clearest expression of Apple’s vision of the future of personal computing”.

Interestingly, when Jobs introduced the iPad he honestly and discreetly — and with his usual visionary acumen — expressed ambivalence about the device’s place in the Apple product universe:

“[The iPad] has to find its place between the iPhone and the Mac.”

The iPad is still a strange animal. It’s an important member of Apple’s products bestiary, certainly, but one that is difficult to corral. Is it a laptop minus an optional keyboard? A simple tablet sweetly obeying our index finger in its child-like ease of use? Or, more so than a conventional PC switching apps, is it a shifting creature whose identity changes at the user’s — or Apple’s — behest?

In addition to markitecture games such as adding a Pro suffix to some members of the family, Apple has recently differentiated the iPad by creating a superset of iOS that only works on the company’s tablet, the cleanly named iPadOS.

In theory, iPadOS fixes the many shortcomings of previous iOS versions that tried to serve two masters, the iPad and the iPhone. Apple’s iPadOS page is adamant that a world of possibilities is now “ours”. The “Features” section provides a long, long list of new iPad talents.

Without getting into the embarrassing details about the klutziness that makes me a good product tester because I tend to do things that knowledgeable users already know how to do, I’m confused and frustrated by all of these “possibilities”. For relatively simple tasks such as using multiple apps side by side or opening more than one window for an app such as Pages, the iPad support site is cryptic and, in some cases, just plain wrong. As just one example, the on-line guidance advises: “go to Settings > General > Multitasking & Dock…”. Trouble is, the General section of Settings on my iPad Pro doesn’t have a Multitasking & Dock section. A little bit of foraging gets me to the Home Screen & Dock section where, yes, the Multitasking adjustments are available.

On the positive side, one now has a real Safari browser, equivalent in most regards to the “desktop” version, and the ability to open two independent windows side by side.

Because I feel self-conscious about my mental and motor skills, I compared notes with a learned friend, a persistent fellow who forced himself to learn touch typing by erasing the letters on his keyboard. He, too, finds iPadOS discoverability to be severely lacking. There are lot of new and possibly helpful features but, unlike the 1984 Mac, not enough in the way of the hints that menu bars and pull-down menus provide. It all feels unfinished, a long, long list of potentially winning features that are out of the reach of this mere mortal and that I assume will remain undiscovered by many others.

Kvetching aside, we know that Apple plays the long game. Today’s stylus equipped and mouse-capable iPad shows great promise. (I connected my trusted Microsoft Mouse and its two buttons and wheel — no problem.) It clearly has the potential to become a multifaceted device capable of a wide range of interactions. From the simplest one-finger control enjoyed by children and adults alike to the windows and pointing device interactions “power users” hope for, the iPad shows great potential — and the need for more work to make the new features more discoverable.

In the meantime, one can Google “How to use iPadOS new features”… and come to the disappointing realization that Apple’s own site is at least as good if not better than help offered on the Web.

— JLG@mondaynote.com