Apple's enterprise tablet challenge: Does the iPad Pro measure up?

The iPad has grown a 12.9-inch screen and added keyboard and stylus options. Will this be enough to attract more enterprise buyers and reverse the sales decline of recent years?

Apple's 12.9-inch iPad Pro with optional Smart Keyboard.
Image: Apple

Apple's newly announced iPad Pro comes at an interesting and potentially critical point in the iOS tablet's lifecycle. The iPad is widely credited with kicking off the modern tablet era in 2010, but sales appear to have peaked around the beginning of 2014, with consistent negative year-on-year growth since then:

Despite these declining sales, the latest worldwide tablet market share figures from IDC show Apple still in the lead with 24.5 percent, followed by Samsung with 17 percent. The next three vendors in the top five -- Lenovo, Huawei and LG -- only account for 13 percent of the market between them, with a long tail of 'other' vendors making up the remaining 45.6 percent:

IDC's figures also highlight a seven percent year-on-year decline in the tablet market in Q2 2015, with only Huawei, LG and (to a lesser extent) Lenovo seeing increases in unit sales. (Note that IDC's numbers include 2-in-1 hybrids like Microsoft's Surface devices as well as slate tablets such as the iPad).

Apple's recent push to increase the penetration of iOS devices in enterprises, including partnerships with IBM and more recently Cisco, shows that the company is looking to emphasise the business use case to boost its flagging tablet sales (as well as to continue the unparalleled growth of its iPhone smartphones). Of course, iOS devices have infiltrated many enterprises through BYOD, but Apple is now looking to make it much easier for CIOs to deploy them officially.

Unfortunately, the latest news is not encouraging here, either. Good Technology's quarterly Mobility Index Report for Q2 2015, which analyses data from the enterprise mobility management specialist's customer base (using the Good Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform or Good for Enterprise), shows that iPad activiations have dropped to 64 percent, having accounted for 81%-92% of tablet activations since Q1 2013:

The dent in the iPad's enterprise footprint has been made by Android tablets, which grew from 15 percent to 25 percent between Q1 and Q2 2015, and Windows devices (including Microsoft's Surface hybrids), which saw a sharp increase from 4 percent to 11 percent of activations (having never previously accounted for more than 1%). As Good's report puts it: "The erosion in iPad dominance points to a change in the tablet market as the long-predicted role of tablets as laptop replacements finally becomes a reality."

So will Apple's new 12.9-inch Pro model prove to be the shot in the arm that the iPad evidently needs? To get an idea of the grown-up iPad's prospects in the enterprise, it's worth comparing what it brings to the table with some June 2014 survey results from Panasonic (maker of ruggedised Toughpad tablets) and VDC Research. Panasonic/VDC's survey respondents were 186 "individuals with direct experience and responsibilities for enterprise mobile solution design and application development either for their organization or their organization's clients."

The top four tablet requirements for enterprises, according to the survey respondents, are: battery life (30%), reliability (28%), security (23%) and price (21%). IT managers are particularly concerned with issues like the ability to work in direct sunlight, with gloved hands and in wet conditions, and with the effect of reliability on the total cost of ownership (TCO). According to the survey, each percentage point increase in the tablet failure rate adds 5 percent to the TCO, on average. There also seems to be a clear divide between consumer and ruggedised tablets when it comes to support costs, which amount to 90 percent of the TCO for the former, compared to 62 percent for the latter.

What's clear is that, even with a bigger iPad Pro in the ranks, the iPad remains very much a 'white collar' device, whereas many of the vertical markets in which tablets have a viable use case really require 'blue collar' devices with distinctly un-Apple features like ruggedisation and an extensive ecosystem of accessories (such as barcode scanners, smartcard readers, alternative connection ports, POS cradles, vehicle mounts and so on). Since Apple shows no sign of making a radical departure from its design-led consumer hardware heritage, the iPad is unlikely to break out of the white collar/knowledge worker market.

This bias is also evident in the roster of IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps available at the time of writing. There are currently 32 apps in total, 20 of which are designed for the iPad. Of these, only five (Asset Inspect, Rapid Handover, Expert Tech, Expert Resolve and Field Inspect) are aimed at field/warehouse workers:

IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps

Industry	Apps	Target users	iPad	iPhone	Watch
Employee Experience	Travel Plan	business travellers		x
	Travel Track	business travellers		x	x
	Shift Sync	employees		x	x
	Shift Track	managers	x
Healthcare	Hospital RN	nurses		x	x
	Hospital Tech	technicians		x	x
	Hospital Lead	nurses, care managers	x
	Home RN	in-home care providers		x	x
Retail	Order Commit	merchants	x
	Dynamic Buy	retail buyers & partners	x
	Sales Assist	retail associates	x
	Pick & Pack	sales associates		x
Banking & Financial Markets	Advise & Grow	bankers	x	x
	Advisor Alerts	financial advisors	x	x
	Trusted Advice	wealth advisers	x
	Loan Advise	mortgage officers	x
	Loan Track	mortgage officers		x
Energy & Utilities	Field Connect	technicians		x	x
	Asset Inspect	field technicians	x
Industrial Products	Rapid Handover	foreman	x
	Safe Site	foremen		x
Telco	Expert Tech	field technician	x
Electronics	Expert Resolve	field service professionals	x
Government	Incident Aware	police officers		x	x
	Case Advice	case workers	x
	Field Inspect	field workers	x
Insurance	Risk Inspect	underwriter	x
	Retention	insurance professional	x	x
Travel & Transportation	Ancillary Sale	flight attendant		x
	Passenger Care	customer service agents	x
	Passenger +	flight crews	x
	Plan Flight	pilot	x

Outlook

The iPad (and more generally, any tablet running a mobile OS) is being squeezed: for communication and content consumption, large-screen smartphones (phablets) are better connected and more easily carried; and for content creation, ultrabooks and hybrids running desktop OSs offer more functionality for increasingly smaller trade-offs in terms of weight and battery life.

Apple, it seems, has two options in the business tablet market. The first is to make the iPad more like a laptop by increasing the screen size, offering a keyboard and adding advanced iOS features like multitasking -- which is what it has done with the iPad Pro and iOS 9. However, the further it goes down this road, the more the limitations of iOS (such as the lack of a native file manager) become evident.

Alternatively, Apple could make its lightest and slimmest OS X laptops -- the 2015 MacBook or the MacBook Air -- more like a tablet, adding a touchscreen and a detachable keyboard to compete more effectively with Microsoft's increasingly popular Surface devices and their third-party ilk. That, of course, would require OS X to become touchscreen-friendly -- something that Apple has so far resisted.

With that in mind, it's interesting to compare the key features of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the 12-inch 2015 MacBook and Microsoft's 12-inch Surface Pro 3:

	Apple iPad Pro	Apple MacBook (2015)	Microsoft Surface Pro 3
Screen size	12.9in.	12in.	12in.
Screen resolution	2,732 x 2,048 (264ppi)	2,304 x 1,440 (226ppi)	2,160 x 1,440 (216ppi)
Touchscreen	yes	no	yes (10-point)
Keyboard	optional (Smart Keyboard)	integrated	optional (Type Cover)
Digitiser + stylus	optional (Apple Pencil)	no	yes (N-trig)
Weight	713g (723g with LTE), Smart Keyboard weight n/a	920g	800g, 295g for Type Cover
CPU	Apple A9X	Intel Core M	Intel Core i3, i5, i7
GPU	n/s	Intel HD Graphics 5300	Intel HD Graphics 4400
RAM	4GB	8GB	4GB, 8GB
Connectors	Lightning, audio, Smart Connector	USB-C, audio	USB 3.0, audio, Mini-DisplayPort, cover port
Internal storage	32GB, 128GB	256GB, 512GB	64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB
Storage expansion	via Lightning-USB adapter	via USB-C	via MicroSD, USB 3.0
Wireless	802.11ac + MIMO, Bluetooth 4.2	802.11ac wi-fi, Bluetooth 4.0	802.11ac wi-fi, Bluetooth 4.0
Mobile broadband	optional (LTE)	no	no
GPS	yes (on LTE model)	no	no
NFC	no	no	no
Sensors	Touch ID, 3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer, ambient light	Force Touch, ambient light	ambient light, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer
Cameras (rear/front)	8MP / 1.2MP	480p FaceTime (0.3MP)	5MP / 5MP
Claimed battery life	10h	9-10h	9h
User-replaceable battery	no	no	no
Charging connector	Lightning	USB-C	proprietary (magnetic)
OS	iOS 9	OS X 10.10 (Yosimete)	Windows 10 Pro
Security features	Touch ID (+6-digit passcode), 2-factor authentication, VPN API, Remote Wipe	Gatekeeper, FileVault2, Remote Wipe, iCloud Keychain, App Sandbox	UEFI, TPM 2.0, BitLocker, Windows Hello, Windows Passport, Device Guard
Price	$799-$1,079 (tablet), $169 (Smart Keyboard), $99 (Apple Pencil)	$1,299-$1,599	$799-$1,799 (tablet), $129.99 (Type Cover)

It's clearly possible to create a highly functional and versatile tablet/laptop with a 12-inch touchscreen, weighing around 1kg with at least 8-hour battery life using today's technology. However, the best example of such a device at the moment is probably still the Windows 10-based Surface Pro 3. It's no coincidence that many IT managers and business users are eagerly awaiting the Surface Pro 4, or that Microsoft has recently kicked off a Surface Enterprise Initiative to counter Apple's recent partnerships.

The iPad Pro looks like an impressive device, and should generate an uptick in Apple's tablet sales. But whether it will arrest the long-term downward trend is another matter: it's unlikely to capture much of the 'blue collar' enterprise tablet market without a rethink of the industrial design, while building a true tablet/laptop hybrid may require some serious tinkering with OS X.