iPad Press
The iPad has garnered tons of attention before, during, and after its release. It was heavily anticipated, eagerly watched, and has created a firestorm of reviews after its announcements that range all over, but are generally whiny in some capacity or other. There is a lot about the iPad that was hoped for and that it is not delivering. Apple knows that – it also knows something else, and stated it during the keynote, that is usually lost in all of these reviews.
The biggest disconnect is coming in the form of, “this is not what I expected,” and extrapolating from “I” to a broader technical market where that may not actually be the case (or skewed toward an overtly vocal minority). We’ll see how the numbers actually play out when models begin shipping in 60 days or so, but chances are those who are complaining about its failings are not actually in the target demographic.
It’s all well and good for me to be dismissive about the knee-jerkery of others, but can I back it up? I hope so. I’ll actually start by borrowing a jab from the product’s biggest detractors: it’s a basically an over-sized, over-powered smart phone that can’t make calls. This is largely what Apple themselves said during the unveiling (and to which I referred above): they’re looking for a product need in between smart phones and laptops:
Smart Phone:
- Good battery life (compared to laptops)
- Highly portable
- Ubiquitous data accessibility
- Limited computational power
- Limited local data storage
- Limited interface
Laptop:
- Computationally capable
- Large local data storage
- Large and capable interface
- Limited battery
- Limited portability (they don’t work well in all environments)
- Potential data availability issues (or at least costs)
The concepts of application availability we can largely throw out for now based on the demonstrable market forces in developing applications based on anticipated demand, as shown by app stores (iTunes being the largest, but not the only example).
So the complaints about the iPad seem based around the expectation that it was going to be everything that MacBooks or other notebooks (or even netbooks) are, and somehow fit them into a different form factor. For the most part, Apple’s done that previously in the the MacBook Air: given the constraints they were shooting for (screen size, usability, battery life, and dramatically enhanced portability/nifty form factor) it’s an over-powered netboo0k and/or an underpowered notebook: bigger than a netbook, not quite as useful as a full notebook due to its processing and data capacity limitations – I can’t comment on the sales figures for the product line because I haven’t seen them, but simple economic sense suggests that they haven’t penetrated the lower-priced netbook arena where it would be able to compete in features because the price point is set around the same level as full notebooks (which in turn best its own feature set handily).
To the iPad then:
- Excellent battery life (if the 10-hour figure is to be believed)
- Good portability
- Ubiquitous data accessibility (if you go for 3G – if not, you’re as constrained as netbooks w/WiFi)
- Moderate computational power (custom silicone augments the software to almost total hardware acceleration for common operations, which makes things both snappy and gentle on the power-consumption; a good move, overall)
- Large and capable interface (the usability of the on-screen keyboard in real-world situations has yet to be seen, but the first large scale multi-touch platform lends to new worlds of possibilities)
- Moderate data storage (unheard of for a smart phone, but underwhelming in notebook standards)
This hits Apple’s intended mark squarely: it is between smart phones and netbooks, and addresses the market segment which needs, or could effectively use, just a little more than they get out of a smart phone, but not as much as would make them require a note/net- book. It is the convergence of the tangents along which both smart phones and netbooks have been evolving, hoping to capture the market segment suggested by that intersection rather than really competing with either and is intended to live along side both.
The smartest move though is a pricing point along the same lines (or vectors, even): this will cost a little bit more than an unlocked smart phone, and a little less than lower-end netbooks, and while I’m confident that deal-hounds will be able to best it on a dollars-for-Xflops in terms of computational capacity (and Xbytes on the reciprocal data figure), that Apple has stepped out into a new territory – it is not yet the Dream Tablet or convergent communications device of sci-fi near future, but it is a competent offering by an established technical competitor with the kind of force that they can bring to bear. In this new territory everything will be discussed in terms of how it compares to the iPad, which acts as an initial bar and corresponding litmus test. Other providers will see how this performs and respond either by avoiding or competing, including Apple, whose first forays usually miss the mark in some capacity and require a generation or two of evolution to properly adapt to the also-evolving niche that forms around it (OS X, iPod, and iPhone being excellent examples of iterative improvement).
It’s definitely not for everybody, and will take a few releases or at least OS upgrades for them to figure out how to incorporate the feedback that will help to capture and refine the market. If you don’t like it, don’t buy one – but quit whining.*
*Except about the camera. Why on earth does this not have a camera?
my girlfriend is going to give me an ipad on my birthday this month.