iPad Pro: too little too late for business
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — While Apple doubled down Monday on its iPad Pro business tablet line, rival Dell was heading off in a very different direction.
The technology giant quietly disclosed that it was exiting the Android tablet business, which failed to gain any traction in the enterprise.
Don’t start ranting just yet, fanboys. Because this isn’t a victory for iOS over Android. Indeed, if there’s a winner to be crowned here, it’s Dell, not Apple.
Dell, a leader in enterprise computing, understands the window of opportunity for tablets to displace Windows PCs already has slammed shut. So it’s decided to scrap its Android tablets and offer only Windows business devices.
Meanwhile, Apple, a company forever relegated to the fringe of big business, holds onto the misguided belief that it can forge into the core of business computing with a new tablet, and supplant hundreds of millions of aging PCs in the process.
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It can’t. Like Apple, tablets were never able to break into the heart of enterprise computing. And the iPad Pro brings too little too late to change that. If the iPad Pro is going to replace any business computers at all, it will be Apple’s own MacBooks deployed in traditional Apple beachheads like content creation and point-of-sale applications in retail settings.
EARLY OPPORTUNITIES
When the first tablets rolled onto the scene in 2010, IT departments were open to what tablets could do for them. Indeed, the gaping hole that Windows laptops opened for tablets was wide enough for an Apple car to motor through. Portable PCs were capable computing devices. But they were big and bulky, with poor battery life. Their poor responsiveness made them ill-suited for quick-hit tasks like querying inventory or generating trouble tickets. And smartphones weren’t yet large enough or capable enough to take up much of the slack.
As a result, businesses did adopt tablets, but only for use in point solutions on the fringe of the enterprise. With few exceptions, the new devices were never able to penetrate the core workflows that IT supports. In some school districts, for example, iPads are widely used in classrooms for student instruction. But teachers and administrators still use PCs to take care of their business.
And now it’s too late to gain more ground. Larger, more powerful smartphones helped squeeze the tablet opportunity. But the real credit goes to the laptop ecosystem.
The tablet phenomenon was a wake-up call for the PC ecosystem, and companies like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Lenovo reacted swiftly. What they produced in response has come to be known as 2-in-1 PCs: thin notebooks with touch screens that can be used either as tablets or laptops.
The 2-in-1’s are much sleeker, more responsive systems with far better battery life than the standard corporate-issue laptop of the tablet’s early days. The latest crop of business 2-in-1’s is even attractive enough to be considered cool, which is a stark contrast to the stigma-inducing systems so prevalent just a few years ago.
RETURN TO NATURAL STATE
I’ve said for years that the equilibrium number of personal devices is two: one in the pocket and one in the bag. When a third becomes attractive, it’s because it’s addressing shortcomings in one or both core devices. And when the core devices adapt to address the need, we return to equilibrium. It’s why digital music players like the iPod are as scarce these days as Palm Pilots, Garmin handheld GPS devices and Audiovox portable DVD players. And, one day, tablets.
Some counter that the iPad Pro tablet has outsold the Surface Pro 4, Microsoft’s new high-end 2-in-1. Which is true. But so what? Shipments of 2-in-1’s are one of the few growth spots in the computing market. The overall tablet market is declining. In fact, the new iPad Pro isn’t even generating enough sales to reverse the drop in overall iPad shipments.
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Dell understands that the tablet opportunity in big business has passed. So it’s betting on its 2-in-1 Windows offerings. Meantime, Dell dropped prices by $200 to clear out inventory of its Venue 7000-series line of Android tablets. The 8-inch models now start at $199.
The just-announced 9.4-inch iPad Pro starts at $599 — three times the price of the entry-level Venue tablet. But for enterprise buyers, the prices are irrelevant. Because they’re not going to buy either tablet. It’s back to business as usual for them. Which is Windows.
Mike Feibus is principal analyst at FeibusTech, a Scottsdale, Ariz., market strategy and analysis firm focusing on mobile ecosystems and client technologies. Reach him at mikef@feibustech.com. Follow him on Twitter @MikeFeibus.