by Jean-Louis Gassée

While the tablet/PC hybrid has always been an irresistible notion, implementations have fallen short of the Platonic ideal. A look at past efforts leads us to imagine Apple’s next steps: Will they copy Microsoft and “tabletize” the Mac, or continue to concentrate on iPad evolution?

Apple execs have had to eat their words after strong but imprudent pronouncements. For example, thus spake Steve Jobs at an August 2010 iOS 4 event:

“It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.”

And there’s Tim Cook’s famous April 2012 toaster-fridge pronouncement mocking the idea of a PC/tablet hybrid:

“You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator but you know, those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.”

There is no shortage of crow: After Apple cut the price of the original iPhone, the company apologized by way of a $100 store credit to early buyers. Late last year, critical backlash compelled Apple to reduce the price on Lightning and USB-C cables and adapters after removing the ports from the MacBook Pro.

Apple lives under a media microscope — a testament to its success — and one exec or another will inevitably end up saying or doing something that will need to be “adjusted” down the line. And Apple execs are good at “adjustments”. Phil Schiller, SVP of Worldwide Marketing at Apple, absorbed the MacBook Pro fault with aplomb:

“I have never seen a great new Apple product that didn’t have its share of early criticism and debate — and that’s cool. We took a bold risk, and of course with every step forward there is also some change to deal with. Our customers are so passionate, which is amazing.”

When Jony Ive explains that Apple didn’t make a stylus but something “more profound”, a Pencil, we welcome the change of mind while smiling at the language Apple’s Chief Design Officer uses to share his insights in the matter of writing instruments and bridging the gap between the analogue (using Sir Jony’s British spelling) and digital worlds.

Are Schiller and Ive a bit disingenuous? I don’t think so. I’d rather hear trenchant, honest opinions and attitudes than be subjected to the too-prudent, contorted pablum secreted by PR corpocrats: “Please know that we’re reading your comments and hearing you loud and clear. Your input is incredibly valuable in helping us…”.

Apple’s U-turns shouldn’t surprise us. Memorializing Steve Jobs in 2012, Tim Cook was most impressed with the Apple co-founder’s ability to quickly change his mind [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

“He would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180 degree polar opposite position the day before. I saw it daily. This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change.”

Mulling those wise words, I can’t help wonder what other Apple changes of mind are awaiting us. We’ve already seen hints of a U-turn with recent iPad Pro developments. With its Smart Keyboard and Pencil it’s the ultimate toaster-fridge apostasy, an alternative to Mac (and other) laptops, an unofficially acknowledged answer to Microsoft’s hybrid Surface device family.

How far will reversals go?

I’ll start with something I consider unlikely: The introduction of tablet features to the Mac. For Mac laptops, Apple has issued a strong edict: The ergonomically correct way to use a laptop it to keep your hands on the horizontal plane, no lifting one’s arm to touch the screen, no matter how tempting. The MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar keeps our hands where they belong, on the desk.

The hands-down approach to the laptop isn’t just a philosophy or an attitude, it’s born from technical demands: The Mac User Interface is built around precise, pixel-level manipulation of objects. If a touch screen were introduced, the platform would have to be redone, apps from Apple and from third parties would have to be reworked, and a stylus/Pencil worked in. Moreover, the Mac OS would have to be forked since the iMac certainly won’t incorporate a touch screen.

Microsoft went to the trouble of combining a touchscreen into its PC/tablet Surface line, and as respectable as the effort has been, it hasn’t staunched the decline of Windows PCs. For Apple, the incentive is even less obvious.

Still, the thought that the Mac might be “converged” with a tablet isn’t completely dead. And it was awakened, recently, with Microsoft’s announcement of what I’ll call WOA II, Windows On Arm Part Two.

Windows’ first stab at an ARM processor took place in 2012. I went to Palo Alto’s Stanford Shopping Center and bought a Surface tablet running Windows RT, the ARM version of Microsoft’s legacy OS. The product didn’t feel quite right. I found out I wasn’t alone having a mediocre experience and I promptly resold the tablet to an eager buyer who was anxious to take it back to Poland.

Some five years later, Microsoft has taken another go at running Windows and its applications on ARM-based hardware offered by long-standing OEM partners such as HP and ASUS. A greatly enhanced battery life (20 hours or more) and the always-on smartphone-like connectivity are marked improvements. And you can run legacy Intel x86 applications straight out of the box — no recompile necessary, the underlying ARM-based OS uses sophisticated software techniques to make the translation seamless!

Or so we’re told. As Peter Bright explains in one of his always well-documented Ars Technica pieces, the expectation of a “seamless transition” might prove a bit optimistic as performance is likely to suffer for processor-intensive apps. In any event, we won’t see actual products and prices until “Spring 2018”.

When Microsoft tried ARM hardware in 2012, Apple stuck with the x86 for the Mac. But what about this time? Will Apple remove the Intel heart from the MacBook and replace it with the Ax processor that powers the iPhone and iPad? After all, benchmarks show that the new A11 Bionic has more than enough power to run OS X software…

For many, it’s an obvious and welcome evolution…but, “fantasy” might be a better word. Even if Apple were able to perform the same emulation magic as Microsoft — that is, run x86 OS X apps on an ARM Mac — the move would split the Mac line into two parts: A Pro branch that requires high-power multicore Intel processors such as the ones used in the iMac Pro and next year’s rumored Mac Pro, and a MacBook line powered by Apple’s home-grown Ax processors. The payoff would be a slightly less expensive MacBook with an improved battery life, but with the unavoidable penalties — the bugs and degraded performance — of running emulated x86 OS X software.

And how does this weigh against Tim Cook’s proclamation that the iPad Pro is “the clearest expression of Apple’s vision for the future of computing”? An ARM-based Mac would be quite a change of mind. Frustrating as the low-end x86 processors might be, I don’t see Apple copying Microsoft’s move.

For today’s poking at the edges of product lines, we’re left with the iPad. There, Apple seems to have more freedom of movement, as proved by its earlier changes of mind. You want a laptop running on (loosely speaking) an ARM processor that combines a multi-touch interface with classic keyboard/trackpad cursor control? The iPad Pro is almost there.

You may object that this is a lot of handwaving over complicated software and User Interface challenges. Sure, but compared to what? Emulating an old OS and its apps and building a new hardware platform? Toaster-fridge jibes aside, making the iPad a hybrid tablet laptop doesn’t feel like a 180-degree change of mind so much as a natural evolution, something users have longed for.

It goes without saying that I have no inside information, that I only predict the past and am prepared to be embarrassed. I just hope to see a strong Apple tablet/laptop hybrid in a not-too-distant future, or your Monday Note subscription money back.

I’ll be in France with family and friends for three weeks starting this coming Tuesday December 19th. Not many Monday Notes expected.

Happy Holidays!

— JLG@mondaynote.com