As everyone knows, when Apple gets serious about wringing serious cash out of its customers, it adds “Pro” to the product name.
I thought I knew why, but I did not. Now I do.
I grew up in the era of Apple as the tool of choice for professional content creators. Naturally, I assumed that any Apple product bearing the Pro moniker is called “pro” because it is a professional content creation tool.
Anyone outside the content creation industry who buys an Apple Gadget Pro is buying something designed and engineered for content creating elites, who require the very best tools to do their creative magic.
But this morning I was trying and failing to use my iPad Pro to edit some text. It is terrible at text editing. So I was having a loud crybaby fit about how if Apple wants its crappy gadgets to be useful tools for professional content creators, perhaps it should, after a decade and a half of negligence, improve the iPad’s text-editing. Maybe optimize it for writing long-form text like articles, stories or film scripts, not teeny-bopper nonsense.
But then, I had an epiphany. A calm settled over me.
Oh! . . . Not that kind of Pro.
Apple Pro products are not for professional content creators. They are not tools for content creation.
These products are fetish objects for Professionals, like business executives, lawyers, doctors, financial analysts. People with radically non-creative high-paying jobs, with massive disposable income.
Those people get the Apple Pro products.
Apple Pro products are luxury items. They are for owning.
I should have seen it sooner. Premium phones and watches are no more useful to a designer or writer or producer or coder than to anyone else. Vision Pro really drives home the point. If there has ever been a device for pure consumption by content consumers Vision Pro is it.
So these products feel unsuited for me precisely because they are not meant for people like me.
Somehow, understanding this fact is a bleak but real comfort.