Forget the iPhone, the iPad Is Apple’s Most Successful Product

The iPad has had a rough time lately. It’s been two years since Apple introduced new iPads, which is officially the longest time the world has ever had to wait.  iPad revenue also declined sharply by 25% year over year in the December quarter. 

The good news is that on May 7th, Apple is finally set to unveil its latest batch of iPads. Plenty of rumors have swirled around what we should expect. The highlights include improved OLED displays on both sizes of the iPad Pro as well as new versions of the iPad Air, including a larger 12.9-inch addition.

It all sounds like Apple is doing the typical Apple thing, introducing a slew of changes big and small that’ll make the next generation of iPads even better and help put tablets back in the popular limelight.

However, the mix of murmurs around slumping sales and buzz over improvements ahead shouldn’t distract from an immediate truth: the iPad is already Apple’s most successful hardware line. 

Before you retort with the obvious, I know that the iPhone as a business dwarfs the iPad, not to mention the total economies of many nations. That’s undeniable. From a pure revenue perspective, the iPhone literally generated close to 10x the revenue ($69.7 billion) that iPads generated ($7.02 billion) for the quarter ending on December 30th, 2023. 

I’m also well aware that the iPad wouldn’t exist without the iPhone, given that even to this day, much of the iPad’s appeal stems from it being just an iOS device with a bigger screen. And yeah, I recognize too that the Mac is a more significant business than the iPad, not to mention the product line that started it all for Apple. 

But when you cut the Wall Street and nostalgia perspectives out of the conversation and think about the characteristics that separate the ordinary products from the great, the case for the iPad’s unique success seems obvious.

The iPad lineup hits on almost all of the qualities I ascribe to successful products.

With deep respect to Dieter Rams, I can’t encapsulate everything that defines a great consumer product into 10 succinct rules. But there are at least a few general characteristics that I believe most successful products share.

• They do what they are designed to do well.
• They function reliably and consistently.
• They’re intuitive to use – or at least easy to master after a relatively minimal amounts of hands-on experience.
• They have long functional lifespans, at least relative to the expectations of their category.
• They are obtainable enough to positively impact a broad subset of consumers instead of a fortunate few.
• They blaze new trails in manufacturing, design or functionality.
• They have as minimal impact on the natural environment as possible.
• Enough of them are sold to create a sustainable business.
• They are widely recognizable, and in some cases, their name may one day function as shorthand for the entire product category.

Plenty of highly successful products barely hit on more than a few of these criteria. And yet the iPad line quickly checks off most of these points, even a few more than most other Apple products.

Matt Buchanan via Wikimedia Commons

Just consider these thought exercises.

What other personal gadget do you know of that’s as easily used and loved by consumers of nearly any age, including four-year-olds? (Let’s just put aside debates about whether iPad Kids are the beginning of the end for humanity or not.)

Now, name another tablet off the top of your head. Even if you muttered “the Samsung or Amazon one,” it proves the point. And consider that even as early as 2012, a mere two years after the first iPad launched, stories were already floating around about the iPad becoming a generic term for tablet. 

And what about longevity? iPadOS 17 is the most current edition of the iPad’s operating system. According to Apple, the oldest iPad capable of running the latest OS is the second generation of the iPad Pro, which launched in June 2017, meaning it’ll have had software support for at least seven years. That’s a whole year longer than the oldest iPhone capable of running the latest version of iOS 17, and even slightly longer than the oldest Mac capable of running MacOS Sonoma.

In terms of obtainability, its true that plenty of tablets cost far less than the cheapest 9th gen iPad, which sells for $329. But they also can’t match the iPad’s capabilities. The 10th generation’s MSRP costs a little over a hundred more at $449 but routinely gets discounted for less. The Mini jumps up to $499. Then there’s the iPad Air at $599, and onto the iPad Pros, which can cost as much as $2,399 fully loaded.

That’s the widest range of price entry points for any Apple product line. And while it makes shopping for an iPad more confusing, the upside is there’s an iPad option for nearly everyone who might want one.

A few hardware tweaks can improve the line, but software remains the real issue moving forward.

As much as I love the iPad, it’s still far from a perfect product line. But at least when it comes to the iPad’s hardware specifically, my list of beefs is pretty short these days. 

It’s painfully obvious that the front-facing camera should be the longer side of all iPad models, except perhaps the Mini. The robust rear cameras on the iPad Pro line have also never seemed worth the added expense, at least for mine and the use cases of everyone I know. I wish all models had better, brighter screens at this stage in their evolution. And understanding which models are compatible with various versions of the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard seems to require a Ph.D. 

But these hardware gripes are nothing compared to the iPad’s current software conundrum.  

Apple’s decision to hitch the iPad’s wagon exclusively to iOS made enormous sense initially, especially before the iPad Pro line was introduced in September 2015. iOS was tailor-made for touch interactions. The iPad’s was bigger than an iPhone but still small compared to a laptop. And the entire line was powered by versions of the iPhone’s mobile processor.

Apple

More importantly, the decision also gave the iPad an instant advantage over every other tablet in the form of an enormous library of iOS apps that could also run on the device from day one. 

As the years have gone by though, the original iPad‘s thread of purpose has systematically unraveled – or evolved, depending on your perspective. 

It’s now a product line that’s no longer limited by small screens. The 12.9-inch screen of the iPad Pro is only 0.4 inches smaller than many generations of the MacBook Air. 

It’s a line that also no longer appears content to just be great at browsing the web or playing movies or games. As Apple’s ads in 2018 bluntly stated, some models aspired to be “your next computer.” 

A increasingly larger percentage of the iPad lineup is also no longer hobbled by a mobile processor. For the last three years, the iPad Pro line has shared the same M series of processors powering some of Apple’s Mac desktops and laptops. The iPad Air made the jump as well in 2022.

On the software front, over the last five years, iPads have also gained everything from a “desktop-class” browser to improved file management, to support for accessories like mice, external monitors, and USB-C devices, to even resizable windows through Stage Manager. Most models even pair nicely with a keyboard and a stylus, a thing Steve Jobs famously stated was something that “nobody wants.” 

Apple has essentially done everything it could to transform iPads into the ultimate tablet AND laptop, short of the one glaringly obvious thing – allowing the iPad to run MacOS. 

Despite its enormous versatility and success today, the iPad could easily be killed by other Apple products to come, just like the iPod.

Despite the iPad’s successful product characteristics, it strangely still feels like a product line that’s more likely to disappear than thrive over the next 10 years, at least without a significant further evolution. 

From a purely cynical business vantage point, it’s clear that Apple, at least until it can transition to making more money from services revenue than hardware sales, doesn’t have immediate incentives to let the iPad run MacOS.

But if the idea of an iPad running MacOS to become the ultimate personal computing device feels like a pipe dream, thinking it’ll persist as Apple’s preeminent personal entertainment device seems equally foolish. 

Many reviewers have already described the new Apple Vision Pro as an “iPad for Your Face” for both laughs and as an astute observation about the kind of computing tasks that spatial computing seems poised to excel at. 

Likewise, a folding iPhone in the vein of Google’s Pixel Fold or Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, possibly coming to market in the near future, could also quickly erode the iPad’s core value in Apple’s product line as an iOS device with a big screen.

Then there’s competition from Android tablets, which finally appear to be eroding the iPad’s tablet dominance, at least in certain markets. Google itself even recently gave making a tablet a go again, for the 40th time.

For now, though, in the words of Apple CEO Tim Cook, the iPad seems content to remain as “the most versatile, capable, and elegant tablet on the market today.”

We’ll all see how long that unique product vision can persevere, starting with the new iPad releases ahead.

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