Tim Lee provides a rundown today of the new products Apple is expected to announce tomorrow. Here’s one of them:
Rumors suggest that Apple will make a move in the opposite direction, unveiling a new tablet, possibly called the iPad Pro. It’s expected to be larger than the current iPad, at around 13 inches.
Aimed at business users, it’s rumored to sport a stylus — aiding the kind of precision work business users need to do — and allow users to run two apps side by side. Apple may partner with companies like IBM to help it sell the product to corporate customers.
This made me curious. One of my biggest complaints about the original iPad was its lack of an accessible file system. If all you want to do is play games and update your Facebook page, this is no problem. But if you want to do anything approaching real work, it’s a deal killer. It’s probably the single biggest reason I finally gave up and switched to an Android tablet (and later a Windows tab).
So has Apple ever addressed this? Sort of. It turns out that you can now save files directly to the cloud, and if you install a dedicated app you can save your files to a third-party local file system. That’s progress. But I wonder how well that’s going to go over with corporate IT departments? The good: a third-party file system potentially gives them fine-grained control over things that a native file system doesn’t. The bad: native file systems are easier to support, since they’re the same on every machine and users can’t bollix them up.
In any case, it’s interesting that Apple is yet again trying to go after the corporate market. That’s never been a winner for them, and it’s probably not a great sign that this is apparently their big idea going forward to get iPad sales back on track.
