Is the new iPad worth buying?

Hey y’all, it’s Austin Carr in Boston. Tablets are sort of pointless, and tech companies can’t wait to sell you their new ones. But first…To [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey y’all, it’s Austin Carr in Boston. Tablets are sort of pointless, and tech companies can’t wait to sell you their new ones. But first… Today’s must-reads: • Apple’s [industrial design chief is leaving]( • Twitch’s CEO [aligned with Uber]( on employment policy • Amazon is poised to [take a stake in Hawaiian Airlines]( Why pad? Last week, [Apple Inc. showed off its new iPads](, including the first redesign of its entry-level tablet in five years. Promoted with an array of expensive accessories, the pitch has left many reviewers [confused](. If people need an attachable keyboard, a protective back panel with an adjustable kickstand and a stylus pen (which needs its own [charging cable and separate adapter]() to get the most of their iPads, is it really still a tablet? Or just a laptop you buy in pieces? At [major tech events this fall](, device makers struggled to define what exactly the purpose of a tablet is. Initially heralded as a [revolutionary mobile device]( and potential [PC killer](, the tablet hasn’t really proved to be either. My colleague Mark Gurman went into greater detail about the flaws with the newest set of iPads on Sunday in his newsletter Power On. To be sure, tablets are still selling — nearly [80 million units]( [were shipped]( in the first half of this year, according to research firm IDC — but the tablet’s present and future appears to be as a superfluous peripheral or a mediocre version of the very thing it was supposed to replace: laptops. At first glance, you might see this approach as a [two-in-one PC](, a design Apple CEO Tim Cook once panned as a bad compromise like combining “a toaster and a refrigerator.” Hybrids have become mainstream, in part because of the frustrating limitations of a bare tablet. Microsoft Corp., which has been ahead of the curve on this, touted its [latest Surface]( tablet as a “touch-capable laptop with a full keyboard,” in the words of designer Young Kim. Samsung Electronics Co. has also pitched its [Galaxy Tabs]( as a [laptop replacement]( (even as its laptops seem [desperate to behave like tablets](). Alphabet Inc.’s Google, meanwhile, went deeper on why tablets aren’t particularly useful on their own during a [product event this month](. Rose Yao, a product management vice president, said tablets are stuck inside homes 80% of their lives and are “only useful for a very small portion of the day.” The rest of the time, she said onstage, tablets “feel out of place,” often “hidden away in a drawer, misplaced, presenting a tripping hazard or just out of battery.” To fix this, Google introduced a docking station that charges the device and acts as a speaker, converting the tablet into a smart-home display with voice interactions. Amazon.com Inc.’s new [Kindle Fire tablets are likewise shifting]( toward being a kitchen hub for Alexa. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPad in 2010, he envisioned the novel gadget establishing a “third category” of devices, as essential as smartphones and traditional computers. For tablets to succeed, Jobs said they needed to be “far better” at performing certain “key tasks,” including browsing the web, writing email, playing games, reading ebooks and consuming photos, music, movies and television shows. “Otherwise, it has no reason for being,” Jobs said. The iPad did prove to be a blockbuster at first, soaring to $32 billion in annual sales in 2013 as Mac revenue dipped. But it never really did live up to the hype. While Jobs said the iPad’s digital interface was a “dream to type on,” in reality it was a slow, finger-jabbing experience that made sending emails and navigating the web worse than on a laptop or even an iPhone. Sure, it was nice to consume media on an iPad during a flight or in bed, but did that really justify a standalone hardware category? These days, tablets can’t even seem to justify a standalone Apple event. Cook, instead, introduced the latest [iPads in a tweet](. Last year, Apple generated $31.9 billion in revenue from the iPad, roughly the same as 2013. Arguably the most substantial feature of the new iPad operating system is [Stage Manager](, a Mac-like multitasking system for resizing windows and switching apps. In other words, the tablet is looking a lot more like a laptop with each new release. Or as former Windows President Steven Sinofsky [tweeted]( in response to the new iPad: “Is it some sort of toaster-refrigerator thing?” —[Austin Carr](mailto:acarr54@bloomberg.net) The big story The fantasy of instant delivery is imploding. Venture capitalists held up Gopuff as the solution to a decades-long obsession, but the startup [risks repeating the mistakes of its predecessors](, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Get fully charged To see the holes in the US’s chip export rules, look at Biren Technology. The Chinese startup promises a locally made alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips and sees its TSMC-made products as [not subject to the rules](. Toyota warned that it could fall short of its output goal, [citing chip shortages](. The price of a Bitcoin was less than $20,000 for two weeks straight, [the longest period beneath that threshold]( since late 2020. A UK regulator proposed easing net neutrality rules now that the country is free of the European Union and [is soliciting responses to the suggestion]( until Jan. 13. Spotify appeared to suffer an outage immediately after the [new Taylor Swift album dropped](. 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