iPad Pro to kill off the Windows laptop

Back in June, Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims recommended "Apple should kill off the Mac". He argues that the Mac with its 20 million units is just a distraction, albeit a profitable one, and that the resources dedicated to it would be better invested elsewhere. Looks like something entirely different is about to happen. 

In truth, the Mac is a bit odd. Roughly speaking, the 300 million units PC market is split into expensive commercial machines and cheap consumer machines. The Mac as an expensive consumer machine does not quite fit in. So why doesn't Apple position the Mac as an expensive commercial machine and take a bigger share of the market? The answer is that corporate IT departments resist it. They have been trained to work with Windows machines for decades, are busy maintaining legacy applications and are concerned about keeping the lights on. For them, Apple products are at best tolerated as an exception in a BYOD culture. 

This changed markedly when the iPhone replaced the Blackberry as the device of choice for corporate road warriors. With its relatively closed iOS, the iPhone appeared less supicious than an unruly Mac and services like MobileIron make it palatable to them. For the first time in Apple's nearly 40 years of history, the gates to corporate IT departments are wide open. And here is where the iOS powered iPad Pro fits in. Scores of executives frustrated by cumbersome Windows machines will flock to the iPad Pro. Despite its big screen, it is lighter than the lightest laptop. With its keyboard and the Microsoft Office apps, it lets you handle all corporate tasks. The split screen feature is perfect to comment on documents and with a SIM card, it is always online. Add the facts that it is nearly maintenance free and that IBM and Cisco are developing corporate applications and you have a winner.

Observers describing the iPad Pro as a rival to Microsoft's Surface Pro are missing the point. It is not a laptop that looks like a tablet but a tablet that will severely challenge the Windows laptop - at least in the corporate world.