One more time: What's wrong with the iPad Pro

Same old story—still can’t replace a laptop—with new twists.

The problem is the software, the operating system., the business model.

David Pierce, Wall Street Journal: Apple’s New iPad Pro: Great Tablet, Still Can’t Replace Your Laptop. The new iPad Pro is a seriously impressive piece of hardware. But design, as Mr. Jobs himself liked to say, is how it works. And replacing my laptop with it didn’t quite work… I blame the software.

Niley Patel, The Verge: The Fastest iPad is still an iPad. The one thing Apple didn’t really change on the iPad Pro is iOS 12, which has all of the same capabilities and limitations iPad users have come to expect. Apple wants you to think that the iPad Pro is the future of computing, but if you’ve already used iOS 12 on an iPad Pro, you know exactly how you feel about that idea… Either you have to understand the limitations of iOS so well you can make use of these little hacks all over the place to get things done, or you just deal with it and accept that you have to go back to a real computer from time to time because it’s just easier. And in that case, you might as well just use a real computer.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery: iPad Pro Reviews. The mistake goes back to an article I wrote in 2015 called From Products to Platforms. There I criticized Apple for trying to fix falling iPad sales with hardware, instead of fixing the App Store to allow for viable business models for apps that really do take advantage of the iPad being a “magical piece of glass that can be anything you need it to be.” … Trials and upgrade pricing are what small developers need — and perhaps a reduction of the App Store tax — but I guess that doesn’t fit the services narrative.

My take: Two tweets caught my eye:

An iPad isn’t a laptop replacement. That’s the whole point. pic.twitter.com/4Tr1wkvhEF

— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) November 5, 2018

2015: “iPad Pro review: Big and powerful, but it won’t replace your laptop”
2016: “iPad Pro 9.7 review: Apple’s best tablet, but it won’t replace a laptop”
2017: “iOS 11 on an iPad Pro still won’t replace your laptop”
2018: “Nope, Apple’s new iPad Pro still isn’t a laptop”

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) November 5, 2018

See also: Apple’s curated collection of reviews.