My boss asked for a reaction to the iPad
I’m not a tech blogger so thank god for small miracles. This is an email I sent to my boss after he asked for thoughts on the new iUnicorn. Ignore it if you already read everything about the iPad, but I thought it was a good enough summary of Apple’s product development philosophy that it was worth putting up for some SEO points.
What I’ve noticed about the reactions to the iPad is they fall into two camps. I’m not counting the third camp of people who endlessly repeated feminine hygiene product jokes as if that was the comedic revelation of the century. Don’t think Apple didn’t count on that either — their head of PR is named Katie Cotton, for chrissakes.
Anyway. The two camps: First group is people who weren’t at the event who are underwhelmed by the product because of the features they hoped it would have that it turned out not to have — i.e. e-ink, USB, video camera etc. Then there are the people who *were* at the event and got to play with the thing. Some of them did mention flaws in the product, but for the most part they are raving about it to the point where it was inducing contact embarrassment. Sure, Apple self-selects their demo audience to tilt things in their favor, but I seem to recall the exact same criticisms being made about the iPhone when it came out. And most of them are accurate to some extent, but it didn’t matter.
Here’s the thing about the Apple product team. They know what consumers *really* want. And they know that adding MORE features to the device just makes it Windows Mobile. So they add fewer features, and get better battery life and a simple and elegant use experience. As the product iterates they add more features one at a time, but they make sure that everything they add is necessary and that it works. So the iPhone still doesn’t have multitasking or magical animated desktop art. But it does have a calendar that always syncs and email that always downloads (assuming AT&T is up and running of course).
They don’t give a crap about a disappointed media/tech blogger who was expecting something out of Star Trek, because this blogger guy is probably a bit more technical than the product’s target audience. Jobs pointed out in his keynote that Apple retail stores get hundreds of millions of visitors a year. What he didn’t say is that hundreds of millions of those visitors DON’T BUY ANYTHING because either they already have everything Apple sells (i.e. me) or they can’t afford anything Apple sells. So they go buy a $600 Netbook from HP instead. This is a product for those people.
It’s not an e-reader. It’s not a laptop. It’s something in between, for people who want to be able to watch movies and play video games and read books on the same device but don’t want to worry about formatting disk drives or running antivirus software. Try playing a video game on your Kindle. Try getting 10 hours of battery life out of a laptop.
If there’s any flaw I can point to about the thing at this point, not having actually used one, it’s that you need to own another computer to plug it into. But I bet Jobs has thought of that already and has people working on a solution.
Anyway, I’m risking my dignity if I keep blathering on about it. I’ll probably get one as soon as they come out, so you can try mine.
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