Rui Carmo
Apple is constantly shirking away from letting the iPad become a productivity tool, and it’s going to cost them in the long run. Having used my iPads as laptop replacements for years, I got tired of the absence of simple things like keyboard-based task switching — which is only (sort of) available with VoiceOver enabled — a filesystem, or data sharing functionality like activities (which made it rather belatedly into iOS 8), because a perquisite for productivity these days is smooth flow between apps, both from a UX perspective and in terms of data.
Apple can’t deliver on that if it keeps thinking of the iPad as an (even bigger) iPhone. And it’s not a matter of size (although it probably doesn’t want to kill off the 11" Air just yet), but of computing paradigms — the “data silo” model of iOS apps is also a problem. But the UX certainly doesn’t help. The fact that my post from 2012 about iPad keyboard shortcuts has been by far the most popular article on my site for the past couple of years should tell you something. Heck, it should tell Apple something. No wonder I find the Microsoft Surface compelling. It literally pushes all the right buttons when it comes to productivity.