Why Apple's iPad Pro is absolutely no good for the enterprise

It'll sell by the bucketload, but does this shiny new hybrid actually have what enterprise productivity requires?

Apple's "Event" has come and gone, and with it we got two new iPhones, a re-worked Apple TV and - most relevantly for readers of Computing always looking for new ways to be more productive - the long-rumoured iPad Pro.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus's 3D Touch dynamic was impressive - perhaps even important, as it basically introduced a much-needed ‘right click' functionality for the smartphone. Apple TV was tantamount to Apple quietly and smugly announcing a new videogames console, silently pulling whatever remained of Nintendo's rug out from underneath the venerable Mario Brothers company.

But the iPad Pro, which Apple CEO Tim Cook announced as "the biggest iPad news in iPad since iPad" is a weak offering. In fact, it's more than that - it's an alarming new low for a company I've already recently accused of seriously lacking the capacity to innovate.

The iPad Pro is the biggest rip-off Apple has ever hustled, and an insult to the enterprise and productivity market it claims to be pitched at.

Let me qualify. While it's all been perfectly summed up in Joel Watson's comic - which despite being three years old brilliantly predicts even the correct year for Apple's attempts to claim Microsoft's Surface design as its own initiative - my real issue with the iPad Pro isn't just its me-too hybrid tablet stylings. No, my real issue is with how it's a piece of quality hybrid hardware with absolutely no attempt to provide the enterprise-friendly productivity software it actually needs to be of genuine use. It's not for "professionals" at all - at its very best, it's for prosumers or posers.

It's a consumer device pretending to be useful, when it's still going to be just as hobbled by Apple's walled-garden approach to applications and infrastructure as ever before. This was borne out by the most enthusiastic part of the demo being about how great the iPad Pro is to watch movies on, because the screen's big and it has quad speakers. Some incredibly specific stuff with a medical diagnosis app followed. There was no indication whatsoever the iPad Pro is a device you can take to work and do everything with.

It's probably no secret I'm a fan of Microsoft's Surface hardware, and always have been. Not because I slavishly love the company, and not because I'm particularly impressed by kids doing backflips off picnic tables. In fact, the entire Surface marketing campaign, from the original Pro to the current Surface 3, has been largely a damp squib, with Windows 8's finicky stylings confusing and putting people off to the point where Microsoft had to make Windows 10 free, and almost nobody I know in the ‘real world' beyond the technology press having heard of the brand at all.

People balked last night at the $99 Apple "Pencil" (announced, as pictured above, despite Steve Jobs' infamous "Who wants a stylus?" message at the iPhone's 2007 launch) and $169 keyboard cover attachment. The shock I saw demonstrated across social media shows just how little Microsoft's similarly overpriced Surface hardware peripherals have penetrated the mainstream.

Microsoft's utterly messed up the promotion of an extremely capable piece of kit, and will now pay as everybody rushes out to pay a premium price for an imitation of its hardware with a use case barely improved from the standard iPad.

But what I am a fan of is Microsoft's ongoing attempts to wise up and connect its ecosystem. To try and make everything work with everything else, all under the growing Windows umbrella. To boil it down, a truly brave, forward-looking move by Apple would have been to do what everyone has been waiting for for a couple of years, and announce software that will tie together iOS and OS X in a meaningful way. To add true desktop-style functionality to the device, and open up the floodgates to allow systems administrators to download, build and run anything and everything they want.

Of course, Apple doesn't owe this to the world, and Apple doesn't have to innovate for the sake of making people's lives easier. Steve Jobs' greatest trick was hugely successfully marketing ideas that were just as restrictive and difficult for the world to embrace. Stockholm Syndrome of the highest order.

But watching Apple continue to bang this walled garden drum doesn't just look disingenuous now Jobs has gone and mere mortals are left peddling the message - it also looks and feels unwise. At a press conference in which Microsoft was quite happy to show up demonstrating Microsoft Office running on a device that's basically been stolen from its own design labs, Tim Cook and co. might do well to notice that the world is changing fast, and selling old ideas in a shinier aluminium finish may not last forever if the company continues refusing to get to the heart of not just what people want, but what people need in an evolving technological world.