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A New iPad Pro? In This Economy?
The timing couldn’t be worse for Apple’s new products
On Wednesday, as the market continued its free fall in response to the global coronavirus pandemic that’s claimed more than 8,000 lives, Apple… unveiled a new range of iPad Pros, starting at $799 with an optional $299 “Magic Keyboard,” and a refreshed MacBook Air.
The people who buy them will be the ones who always do: They’re relatively wealthy, in a position to splurge on a device while others are making tough calculations at the grocery store. They don’t need to worry that these gadgets are hell to repair, because a year or two from now, they can buy an upgraded model that Apple will release on its usual schedule. The new gadgets offer marginal improvements over the previous ones, which were released less than two years ago — the addition of a lidar scanner and trackpad for the iPads, more storage and a new keyboard for the MacBook Air — but you wouldn’t call these an epoch shift in personal computing. What they represent is a marginally better future for the people who are in a position to enjoy it, and the continuation of a dreadful status quo for the many who cannot.
These extraordinary times have the effect of laying bare the strangest aspects of “normal” life, shedding light on many flaws in our system, big and small, that we can now choose to correct. For example, Los Angeles County reduced daily arrests from 300 to 60 in response to the pandemic: “Those who can just be cited without being booked at local jails are being released,” BuzzFeed News explained, suggesting an imbalance in the carceral response to begin with. New York City landlords are realizing that properties should be thoroughly cleaned — perhaps a meaningful note even after the Covid-19 outbreak has passed.
Viewed in this context, the release of new iPad Pros and MacBook Air are an opportunity to think critically about the impact companies like Apple have on our world. There’s no sense in criticizing the new gadgets themselves (I have to disclose that I’m abashedly tempted by the new keyboard for my own, slightly older iPad Pro), but the era of Covid-19 is nothing if not an invitation to imagine a better future that works for all of us.
