On comments about the iPad

[chipotle]

What was the famous Slashdot quote about the first iPod? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

While I’m not going to predict the iPad will match the success of the previous iP* product lines, there’s a definite party line among the geek crowd that only fashion-conscious fanboys would ever actually buy Apple products and that whenever they introduce a new gadget it’s the Stupidest Thing Ever. If the majority of commenters on Slashdot and TechCrunch did not piss all over a new Apple product, that’s the product I’d expect was in trouble. Given how much pissing is going on around such sites over the iPad, I'm betting the thing is going to sell like crack-infused hotcakes.

Never make the mistake of assuming either of the following:

1. That you really know what a product you've only seen demo videos of is going to be good at. Some things look much better in demos than they really are, and some things have to actually be used to be properly evaluated.
2. That because ultimately a product is not good for you means that it's not good for anyone else. You are not necessarily in the median of the product's target market segment.

(N.B.: I'm not sure I'm in the iPad's target market segment. It's not designed to be a laptop replacement and I'm not sure I need another gadget about. I might rather have it than a dedicated e-book reader, all the arguments for the superiority of e-ink not withstanding, but I haven't been sold on e-book readers yet, either. So.)

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm actually surprised it started at $499; I was expecting it to have prices that ran from $699 up. I'd be surprised if someone could produce something for much less that would be considered really competitive in terms of features and usability. (Look at the recent CrunchPad fiasco, which has resulted in a roughly comparable product -- touch-sensitive high-resolution color display that gives you the Adobe Flash compatibility the iPad doesn't, at the tradeoff of, uh, everything that doesn't involve a web browser -- for... $500.)

The question that remains to be seen is really how niche it's going to prove to be. Apple is essentially saying, "Other people have tried to create a market here and failed, but we think we've got it right." This worked with the iPod -- there were MP3 players on the market before it, but for practical purposes nobody really cared. With the Apple TV, not so much, although it's hard to point to anybody else who's doing much better with the "computer video on your TV" shtick -- so far that market just doesn't seem to really be there. So is the iPad more like the Apple TV, or more like the iPod?

My suspicion is that Apple is making the right move for the long run of personal computers: as ubiquitous computing creeps ever closer, devices which really aren't quite like what PC users (and I'm counting Macs as PCs in this case) have come to expect are going to be the norm. That doesn't mean that devices like the iPad are going to be the norm either, of course, and more than one company has hit the rocks betting on this ubiquitous computing future arriving too soon -- see anything involving the phrase "internet appliance" circa 2000. But there's a lot of infrastructure in place now that wasn't then. While I wouldn't bet a lot on the iPad's eventual success, I wouldn't bet anything against it, either.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

Asus has already announced a Tegra 2 (nvidia's take on an ARM chip) equipped tablet device in the same class for $599 which does 1080p and has hdmi output for presentations etc.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that sounds lovely...

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Look at the track record of people pointing out competition to Apple products -- whether we're talking about the Mac in its various incarnations, the iPod, or the iPhone -- that deliver more features at lower price points. That keeps happening, and every year, Steve Jobs might as well hold a press conference in which he gathers up all the articles talking about how the competition is better, sets them on fire, and screams, "See my hat? It's MADE OF MONEY!"

What Apple "gets" in a way that seemingly very few other companies do is user experience. A friend of mine relayed a story about debating between Mac and PC some years ago, and made his decision based on a simple observation: Mac users he knew tended to say, "Look what I did with my computer," and PC users tended to say, "Look what I got my computer to do." If you look at Apple's consumer electronics devices, they've carried that through: the iPod wasn't the best MP3 player in terms of a feature checklist when it hit the market. The iPhone took a lot of hits in the media for things it didn't do that its competitors did. Yet the iPod has pretty much defined its market segment; the iPhone isn't crushing everything in its path, but it's safe to say it's wildly successful.

The iPad is very clearly not going after the same market that "Windows 7 with a touch interface" would be; if it was, it wouldn't be based on the iPhone, it would be based on OS X. If you want a PC/Mac, you don't want an iPad. I am not going to be doing web development on an iPad. Then again, I'm probably not going to be doing it on a $600 "Eee Pad," either, and that gets to the heart of the argument the iPad is effectively making: most of the stuff that you can't do with it is stuff that the vast majority of people aren't going to want to do with that form factor, and the stuff you do want to do with it is stuff that it's by and large pretty good at.

Again, I'm not saying that the iPad is necessarily a hit, let alone a home run -- but the biggest hurdle to them isn't from competitors playing the feature checklist game. That hasn't worked in the past and I see no reason to think it'll work this time, either. Their gamble is on whether this whole market actually exists.