In February this year, Apple’s computer supremacy was in doubt. Microsoft Surface was catching up to MacBook. A new MacBook Pro had hit stores in November but Pro sales that quarter had only risen by 1%. iPad sales were down 19%, year-on-year.
In that scenario, Apple’s new ad makes sense as part of a turnaround strategy for its large devices. The ad positions iPad Pro as the future – being the device the next generation uses.
But the ad launched in November. And iPad sales had already begun to surge ahead again. In Apple’s Q4 2017 results, iPad unit sales were up 11%, with revenue up 14% year-on-year. Mac sales were up 10%, with revenue up 25% year-on-year.
iPhone unit sales, on the other hand, were up just 3%, with revenue up only 2% year-on-year.
Apple presents iPad Pros as future “computers”, but more importantly Apple as the future, the pacesetter. Interestingly, it presents the future of devices as take everywhere, use anywhere, do anything tools – which is rather like how we were asked to see mobile phones before they became all about their cameras.
The ad follows a girl’s day. She’s out and about with her iPad – never at a desk and in one scene up a tree. On the device she talks to a friend using FaceTime, virtually signs his plaster cast with an Apple Pencil and drops the photo into an iMessage, uses Apple Pencil to turn a puddle into a world of fantasy creatures, completes a handwritten project she is making in Word with a photo she has just taken, and reads a comic book.
Then while she’s lying on the lawn in her garden, her mother asks her, “Watcha doing on your computer?”
The girl replies, “What’s a computer?”
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