Apple sees the future - and iPad means it's profitable
Date Published: {J}
Now the fuss has died down, people are a little disappointed with Apple's new iPad. Some, feeling like the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen story, point and say ‘But look . . . It's just a big iPod Touch’. Can such a product really revolutionise the marketplace like the iPod and the iPhone before it? I can answer that with an unequivocal No. And also, an unequivocal Yes.
No because hell, it is just an iPod Touch. That is, an iPhone with the phone bit taken out. There is nothing new about the iPad except its size, nothing that really moves the state of the art forward. This serves as a reminder that Apple actually innovate very little in technological terms.
They didn't make the first personal computer, they just made a very likable and popular one. They didn't invent the graphical interface, but they brought it to the mass market. They didn't by any stretch of the imagination invent the portable MP3 player, they were just first to combine it with a way to buy music.
They didn't even invent the smartphone, though it would be fair to say they completely reinvented it. Apple are one of the world's most innovative companies, but they don't really do new technologies. They do new markets.
So what is the market here? When you see the actual device, it's hard to figure. Before the launch, pundits – myself included – were seeing the iPad as Apple's attempt to colonise and subjugate the e-book market now that it's on the verge of the big time. Some even saw it as the saviour of the newspaper and magazine industries, providing a whole new business model to replace their current deeply troubled one.
But as it turns out, the iPad is not very suitable for reading. The screen is shiny - and backlit, meaning it won't have the battery life to get through a whole book. Good enough for reading on the daily commute? Yes - but it's too big for the pocket, too easy to drop, lose, or have stolen. Simply by virtue of its physical dimensions and cost, the iPad is mostly going to be used in the home.
Where, oddly, it will be a cheaper alternative to the Mac as a home computer. But it will be an alternative to the Windows PC too - one that will be much easier to keep secure, less likely to need maintenance.
This is largely because it is a much more limited device than the PC, but it will be able to do everything that many – probably most – home computer users actually want to do. Some web browsing, e-mail, media, ‘coffee table’ reading, and down the road probably fairly good gaming too.
Unlike the Mac it is an entertainment-oriented device; as someone nicely put it, for media consumption rather than media creation. Apple have seen a future in which, instead of selling you one computer that can do both those things, they'll sell you one for each.