Is Apple's Legendary 3rd OS about to Reinvent the Failing iPad!
It's not everyday that a company decides to kill of one of its biggest products! Indeed to do such a thing would be a kind of commercial suicide, but thats what Apple did with its failing iPad line! Of course there is a very simple solution to refresh the ailing line almost anew, like a Phoenix arisen from the ashes! And recently, Apple revealed a tiny clue that might suggest they just might be getting ready to give us iPad owners exactly what we wanted when we we first bought that half-revolutionary new product way back in April 2010.
Apple's great fail with the iPad was always that it was basically just an oversized iPhone or iPod touch! Apple of course knew full well that its customers were probably the easiest to please customers the world has ever known! All Apple had to do by way of innovation was to make a move from a silver iPhone to a black, white or Gold one and customers would line the streets almost ecstatic in the belief that they had discovered the greatest evolution a product has seen since Neanderthal man decided to put wheels on that piece of wood they kept pushing around!
Yet slowly, almost subconscious, the seeming lack of evolution in the iPad has caught up with them, and that fact has been highlighted by dwindling sales. Almost like Caesars betrayers, dagger clenched in their hands, Apple turned on its own! With the iPhone 6 and 6+, there was almost nowhere left for the iPad to hide! Like a father turning on its own son, Apple, with the release of 6, pretty much threw the iPad to the dogs. Size matters, it matters a lot, and these days, in the world of smartphones, size is everything!
And so, the total demise of the iPad would almost seem to be a foregone conclusion! Surely, there is no saviour at hand, ready to pull it from the flames! Yet rewind back to that first iPad release and what was it that we were most excited about when its tech specs would finally be revealed? The phrase the “PC Killer” springs to mind! Back then and the iPad was expected to put the final nail in the coffin of the long lasting PC. But of course PC's are still here and they're still doing the things that the iPad, and iPhones still can't, and in all probability the iPad may well be dead long before the PC!
The difference is clear. Apple's iOS is great for apps, and for the internet. But its Mac OS is great for Office programs and for developers that make the programs and there are still thousands of programs that businesses and individuals run on PC's that are not on smart devices! Back in 2010 and one of the big question about the forthcoming iPad was whether it would run the same iOS as the iPhone, or if it would run an OS more similar to Apples Mac OS. When it was revealed it would just be the same old iPhone iOS waves of disappointment reverberated around the world! The iPad would never truly be the legendary PC Killer that techies had been envisioning for so long! Instead, much like the release of a Gold iPhone instead of a black or white one, the iPad's mark in history would simply be that it was an iPhone on steroids!
So what was that tiny clue to a divergence in iPads demise? Well, perhaps there is still hope, and perhaps finally, it will get a chance to slay the mighty PC. As an iOS developer I received a simple mail last month stating that iOS and OS developer accounts, forever separate affairs, had finally become one and the same! What seems like a trivial thing ultimately paves the way to something much bigger and revolutionary. Now that Apple developers can simply make software for OS and iOS at the same time, there is the possibility that the long anticipated, yet in recent years forgotten, 3rd Apple OS might finally be on the horizon.
Now that smart devices have almost the same memory as Macs, the biggest barrier for iPads to have been born with a more Mac OS at their core has finally disappeared. Now they are ready for something bigger, now they are ready to run an OS that can merge between iOS and OS, allowing us to do everything on an iPad, download Mac software at the same time as iOS apps. Finally we'll have an ultra-thin touchscreen PC/smart device hybrid that will put Microsofts Surface to shame! Oh, and of course, just as a footnote, Apple Macs will also be able to finally take on Apple's 3rd OS allowing Apple to pretty much revolutionise the computing industry with not one, but 2 entirely new devices which could perhaps hail the the beginning of 2 brand new, multi-billion dollar products to rival even the gold mine that the iPhone has become! That is of course unless apple drops the ball...again!
