Really Sad ⇥ morrick.me

Riccardo Mori, quoting Phil Schiller:

There’s a second group of people that we’d love to reach with this iPad Pro: Windows users. You may not know this, but the majority of people who come to an iPad Pro are coming from a Windows PC.

Windows PCs were originally conceived of before there was an Internet, before there was social media, before there was app stores, and this is an amazing statistic: There are over 600 million PCs in use today that are over five years old. This is really… sad. It really is. These people could really benefit from an iPad Pro.

[…]

Some said that this is a bit rich coming from a company still selling a 13-inch MacBook Pro containing 4-year-old technology, and whose current Pro laptops could really benefit from an update. I think that Schiller’s comment wasn’t meant to come across as harsh as it sounded. I took it to simply mean that many PC users with old computers are really missing out and should consider an iPad Pro to jump on the Post-PC era bandwagon. But yes, the delivery probably turned out to be more unfortunate than intended.

Schiller’s setup makes it sound like he’s trying to explain their target market: Windows PC users who, with computers that are over five years old, are seeking to upgrade. This is the new “Switch” campaign, except with an iPad in place of a Mac.

But his — I assume — improvised “really sad” punchline didn’t land because having a five year old functional computer is not sad, it is impressive. I didn’t replace my MacBook Pro until it was over five years old. My MacBook Air will turn four this year and, while I ache for a better display, I have no immediate intention of replacing it any time soon. The display in my Air, by the way, is effectively the same panel that has been included with MacBook Airs since at least 2010, making it well over five years old.

It’s a minor smudge on an otherwise decent keynote, but it really didn’t play well.