Apple’s Tool Theory of Devices, or Why iPadOS Will Never Get There
How Apple gets us to buy more stuff
Have you been a Mac user long enough to remember when there was only one choice to make when buying an Apple device: desktop or laptop?
If you’re not in this boat, can you believe there was a time — well before there was an Apple Store with table upon table of distinct items (never mind colours!) — when pretty much the only things Apple sold were the Powerbook and the Macintosh?
Back then, you didn’t have to think about much when it came time to make a purchase (which wasn’t often). You were either happier with more power and less portability or you liked things the other way around.
Things were very simple and people tended to fall into one or the other camp. I don’t remember many of my Apple-using friends (a group I could count on one hand) owning both a desktop and a laptop.
From users to tools
Back then, we didn’t think in terms of having multi devices fit for distinct purposes. We thought more broadly in terms of being one or another kind of user.
Power users had no choice: they were necessarily owners of large desktops. Creative types and also many in the business world who didn’t need much power and liked the aesthetic benefits of using Mac OS were happy using PowerBooks.
Again, the two camps remained fairly separate.
The long transformation
Things began to change on the Mac front, but only slowly.
The PowerBook G4, in 2001, marked the first time truly impressive desktop power came to the laptop.
Apple’s marketing was premised on the idea that a PowerBook was now so powerful that people firmly stuck until now in the desktop camp — video editors, designers, coders — could finally make the break, if they chose, and go portable, without a major compromise.
This was the beginning of the dual device revolution, when a critical mass of people began to own both a desktop and a laptop.
In hindsight, we can see that it happened because there was now more or less power parity across the two categories, and the choice became one about which tools were best for which purposes.
Before, the tools were so distinct, they were made for people in entirely different trades. Cars and trucks. Now, they were more like SUVs of different sizes.
If you could afford to have both a Mac and a Powerbook, you did so as a luxury, an indulgence. You didn’t need one or the other to do your work (either would suffice). But you wanted the benefits each offered.
Apple carries the lessons forward
When the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad first appeared, they replicated the stark division of functionality we experienced in the mid 90s between PowerBooks and Macs.
The iPad was closest in nature to the Mac, but it offered something so clearly different in terms of its uses but also its abilities that there was no question of it cannibalizing the Mac. You only bought one if you wanted to have the tablet experience — if you saw yourself as a tablet person.
Of course, many if not most of us opted to have both an iPad and a Mac, unlike what unfolded in the 90s, when you were only one kind of user or another.
But it was similar to the 90s in presenting you with an easier choice: you didn’t buy an iPad unless you wanted what it offered. And if you did, you couldn’t find it anywhere else: i.e., portability approaching an iPhone, with more function than the Phone but less than the Mac.
Apple’s refusal to cannibalize
Fast forward to the present and we encounter the current dilemma: iPads with keyboards and chips that make them as powerful as Macs — and everyone wondering why Apple won’t unleash their full power by making iPadOS as functional as MacOS.
When are we going to get multiple windows on the iPad and full support for external displays, people keep asking? When will we see something closer to a fully functional Finder? And so on.
Similarly: when will the Mac finally get a touchscreen?
Apple’s answer is clear, but many people refuse to see it and are disappointed with every update of iPadOS and MacOS.
They are never going to converge. They are never going to adopt the best features of the other platform, because doing so would cannibalize them.
The tool theory of devices
Having MacOS and iPad OS work the same way would run contrary to Apple’s tool theory of devices — a theory which works on the various Macs but wouldn’t work if the iPadOS and MacOS gained full parity.
As Apple learned from the PowerBook G4 onward, devices can have power parity, but they need to retain functional difference to induce people to buy both.
All of Apple’s main computers — the phone, the iPad, the Mac — are close in terms of computational power. But they maintain distinctly different functions.
If Apple wanted to, it could port MacOS to the iPhone and most users would no longer need anything aside from their phone, a bluetooth keyboard, and an external display. The phone is powerful enough to do this.
But Apple wants us to think of devices as tools for discrete purposes. It wants us to be like those early adopters of the multi-Mac lifestyle.
It wants us to think of ourselves not as kinds of users (power vs portable), but as owners of a set of tools in a toolbox. And we’ve done just that.
Many of us now have not just one or two but three iPads; two or even three Macs; a phone, a watch, and so on. But all of our devices have the same computational power (or close to it) unnecessarily duplicated several times.
Could you go back?
Can you reject Apple’s tool theory of devices?
Could you go back to being a one-device kind of a user, let alone having a single device in that category? Can you imagine just being a Mac user?
Or maybe you’re more sensible than I am and have just a Mac, a phone, an iPad — no more than one of each.
If so, I admire you, because I’m quite swept up in the tool theory and hopelessly awash in Apple gear.