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“This is the biggest news in iPad since the iPad,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told the crowd as they got their first look at the Pro. And the iPad’s improvements are major, from the 12.9-inch diagonal screen to 5.6 million pixels of resolution and 10 hours of battery life, with graphics the company claims are twice as fast as the last iPad and processing 1.8x as fast. It’s all available starting in November, even the Pencil that seems to fly in the face of Steve Jobs' well-publicized scorn for the Palm-era stylus. Packaged together, however, those pieces all fit a specific puzzle: the needs of a mobile workplace.
To understand why, look to field workers, the salespeople and support staff of companies who meet customers outside the office. Apple’s historical focus on consumers with its products had produced tablets that reps found too small and difficult to use, with no keyboard or stylus to help fill out forms on the fly. That didn’t stop many representatives from adopting iPads anyway starting in 2012, says Jason Lemkin, who sold enterprise company EchoSign to Adobe in 2011 and now invests in enterprise startups at Storm Ventures. To Lemkin, the Pro is what enterprise veterans have been waiting for from Apple. “No one who’s been doing enterprise will be remotely shocked,” he says. “We finally have today what we’d have loved to have in 2011 or 2012. Enterprise is always three or four years behind consumer tech, and this is proof of it.”
The enterprise market has coalesced around Apple even without its apparent interest until now. “Apple’s dominance in enterprise mobility is unparalleled,” says
But as consumer demand for iPads has hit a plateau with slower replacement cycles, demand for tablets in enterprise, and especially for iPads, has been increasing. The percentage of tablets in use for business is set to increase from 14% in 2015 to 20% by 2018, according to new research by Forrester, with more than half of information workers surveyed by the research firm reporting that they already use a tablet at least once a week for work, many of them on personal devices as their companies hadn’t yet corporate policies to issue tablets.
The Pro could appeal naturally to hyper-mobile workers who value ease of use and mobility but need a bigger screen, such as for conducting corporate training, conferencing or consuming a lot of content, says Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder, who wrote the tablet report. The Apple Pencil companion product could also increase appeal for other uses like design and using Asian languages. But Microsoft and Samsung already offer styluses, Gownder cautions. And for companies that use legacy apps that aren’t compatible with iOS, the iPad Pro won’t be a fit for the foreseeable future.
The Pro’s price point—$799 for the cheapest 32 GB model plus another $99 for Pencil and $169 for a smart keyboard—will be acceptable for enterprise customers who see Pro as a potential replacement for costlier laptops, Lemkin says. “You used to have to give employees two devices in the field. Within 12 or 18 months, everyone will just switch their field purchasing to the Pro.”
Potential and active competitors, meanwhile, looked on Wednesday like they were yielding the field to Apple’s new enterprise hunger. Microsoft, which already offered some of the Pro’s features through its own Surface and tablet-laptop hybrid Surface Pro, was a surprise guest onstage at Apple’s event. Microsoft Office executive Kirk Koenigsbauer showed off easy annotation and editing in Word, Excel and even PowerPoint. Then Adobe paid its respects. In his remarks, Cook also called out IBM and Cisco. All three announced partnerships with Apple in recent months.
Embracing Apple as the enterprise tablet leader, however, may not even be enough. During the live event, Apple executive Philip Schiller noted that the Pro outperformed 80 percent of the laptops shipped worldwide in the last 12 months.
“If you’re a mobile enterprise startup, you can probably just bet on iOS now,” says startup investor Lemkin.
