My eye was caught by a headline in the Register, an invaluable online source of tech news and opinion. “Clearance sale shows Apple’s iPad is over. It’s done,” it read. This was a quotation from a piece by Volker Weber on the latest product announcements from Apple. “iPad is the biggest news,” he wrote, “and it says: the iPad is done. Apple is just refining the components, but there isn’t much they can do these days to make yet another super-duper Earth-shattering innovation here.”
Since I was reading this on my iPad Pro, which is probably the most useful electronic device I have ever owned, it came as a bit of a shock. But in fact Volker was really just articulating a truth about digital hardware, which is that the evolution of all such products (and a good deal else besides) follows a sigmoid curve.
It sounds complicated, but it isn’t really. Think of it as a version of the letter S that’s been flattened to form a graph whose vertical axis measures functionality while the horizontal axis represents time. What it tells you is that initially (at the lower part of the S) a new technology develops relatively slowly. Then there’s a point where the functionality increases dramatically over a relatively short period, after which the rate of improvement declines steadily and levels off. The iPad is now somewhere on that upper plateau, which means that it’s reached the point where one can only expect incremental improvements (faster processor, better screen, stereo audio etc). This is what Volker was getting at when he said that the device is “done”.
To the hyperactive tech media sector this means that the product is no longer of any interest and that Apple has “run out of ideas”. In some cases it is also taken as confirmation that the company has never recovered from the death of Steve Jobs. Excitable Wall Street analysts may also see it as evidence that Apple stock should now be downgraded to “sell”. All of which merely confirms the extent to which some of those who opine about technology don’t understand it.
So let’s put the iPad in its wider context. The device, as one expert, Horace Dediu, comments, has an installed base of 300 million users – which is far larger than the 100-150m Mac computers out there. And whereas the iPad built up this user base in roughly seven years, the Mac needed 33.
Digging deeper, Dediu finds that iPad sales continue to increase in the US and the UK, and that user satisfaction with the product continues to be very high. A survey conducted in November 2015 found a 94% consumer satisfaction rate for the iPad Mini, a 97% rate for the iPad Air, and 96% for the iPad Pro; and that browsing, shopping and app usage data also show continuing high utilisation on iPads. Among corporate purchasers there is a 96% satisfaction rate, with 66% intending to purchase more iPads.
Much the same applies to the iPhone, another Apple device that attracts the same kind of commentary – about Apple running out of ideas, that there are only incremental improvements between the iPhone 6 and the forthcoming iPhone 8, and so on. The truth is that that device is also on that upper plateau of the sigmoid curve. It too is “done”.
The same applies to the smartphone generally. So the question is: what next? According to Ben Evans, a tech analyst who seems to know what the industry is thinking, the main candidates are: artificial intelligence (AI); voice interfaces (like Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Home); virtual reality (VR); and augmented reality (AR).
AI is already here – at least in the weak versions now routinely deployed by all the big tech companies as recommendation engines, classifiers, conversation “bots” and other gizmos. Voice is likewise already here, and is useful in limited cases, but it’s no good for sophisticated applications. Although my Amazon Echo now knows that the meaning of life is 42, for example, it still won’t – or can’t – tell me which search engine it relies upon. (Microsoft’s Bing, since you ask.)
So we’re left with AR – a technology that will enable you to point your phone at something and see some digitally exhumed information about it overlaid on the image. It’s a nice idea, but it’s still on the lower end of the sigmoid curve. Some day, though, I hope to be able to point my phone at Dr Liam Fox, secretary of state for international trade and president of the board of trade, and see what he’s thinking. And if the screen goes blank, then I’ll know that the technology is working.