Great piece by Matt Alexander regarding the just-announced 128GB iPad (4):
In the word’s of Phil Schiller, “With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs.”
The rhetoric is telling. The PC is “old” and the iPad and iPhone are at the forefront of the company’s profitability and growth. The iPad is the future of the company’s presence in computing and today, in my eyes, marks the beginning of the company’s true and emphatic push into that era.
In other words, today’s the day the iPad became the Mac. And that’s no small matter to consider.
Now, I don’t know that today is the day the iPad became the Mac, or that there is any particular day at all, for that matter. But a few things are clear: the iPad is cannibalizing Mac sales; and every day it gets a little more capable as a stand-alone PC, and every day a few more people put aside their preconceived notions about “tablets” and they realize the iPad makes a darn good personal computer.
My 3rd-gen iPad “only” has 32GB of storage — just one-quarter of what you can now get. And no doubt there will come a day when the iPad has 1TB of storage. If the original iPad had offered a 128GB capacity, it wouldn’t have been any more usable as a PC on day one than it was with the storage capacities it did offer. And today, my 32GB iPad (3) is just as usable as a 4th-gen iPad with 128GB of storage.
Because the tipping point for the iPad’s usability isn’t mostly regarding internal storage. The tipping point is the apps. People are “finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs” because of the iPad’s apps, not its storage capacity.
Anyway, getting back to the point Matt is making in his article, he’s not arguing that the iPad is “finally” usable now that it comes in 128GB flavor. Rather, he’s making a point that a threshold has been crossed. And I agree. The iPad just became that much more “professional grade” — which is just one more reason for people to buy and use an iPad rather than a traditional Mac or PC.