OK, so here’s the thing. I like Apple.
They design nice products for me to look at …have cool, clean stores, staffed with overly-happy tweens….and lately have been on a real hot streak with bringing us products with real innovation.
I was all ready to order up a few all-black mock turtlenecks, and try growing some scruff so I could look more like Steve Jobs and the guy from the Apple/PC commercials. But you know what happened?
The iPad announcement.
Yeah, I was really looking forward to this (as were countless others). Ever since we bought our iPhone, secured a snazzy case, and filled up our phone with apps, we’ve been waiting for another reason to give Apple more of our money. Recession? Pffff…..my gadget budget is untouchable.
I sifted through article after article, rumor after rumor, of what the iPad announcement was going to entail. I had a mental note that the big iPad announcement was happening on Jan 27th, during MacWorld. I set my Engadget bookmark to auto-refresh day-of so I would catch the latest announcements, live, as-they-happened…..then reality hit.
Steve Jobs walked on stage, waived his hands, and if you would have walked in my office at the time you would have caught me hunched over with a “WTF” expression of my face.
This is THE iPad? Really?
I had to retread through my blogs, and make sure I didn’t miss anything. But nope, that was it.
That’s when it hit me….THE iPad is nothing more than a oversized iPod Touch. Not even an oversized iPhone! An iPod Touch! You know, the things that you see 10-year-olds carrying (with no camera or phone-call capabilities).
Innovation-wise…this announcement brought nothing. What can I do with the iPad that I can’t already do with my iPhone?
You can view your webpages BIGGER! And because its BIGGER its “MAGICAL!” I couldn’t believe how many times Jobs threw around the word “MAGICAL.” Has his head really gotten so bloated over all the accolades and praises for his hand in developing the iPod and iPhone, he now believes the stuff he makes is MAGIC?!
iPad sucks.
But you know what? People are still going to buy it. People are going to line up in drones and exclaim how “MAGICAL” it is, just because Steve Jobs told them so.
My mom, even called me up that day “Did you hear about that new iPad? You can read books on it. Are you going to get one?”
Ummm…Hell NO! The hype is unreal.
Actually, if one thing about the iPad announcement pissed me off the most….it was Steve Jobs touting it as a legitimate e-Reader.
The damn thing has an LCD screen! Before iPad, an “e-reader” was a term reserved to things that actually had some technological innovation in reading…..things like the Kindle, Sony e-Reader, and the Nook. You know things with E-ink technology. Displays that are less harsh on the eyes than LCD, and actually look like pen and ink.
The iPad doesn’t make the electronic reading experience any better than the LCD monitors we’ve been staring at everyday for the past 10 years. It’s not an e-reader. But people are eating it up and the ignorance kills me.
What really irks me though, is that iPad had so much promise. It could have been so much more.
Consumers really do want a device that slots between their desktop/laptop and phone. So much so that most will naively believe that this IS the answer.
What Apple really should have done though, is developed an OS that fell in that same region. More powerful than the iPhone, but more snappy and resource-friendly than a desktop.
Instead Jobs just put together a rebranded ARM processor, powered by an iPhone OS in a 10″ LCD package and called it “magic”. I call it lazy.
iPhone OS only goes so far. And now-a-days, to be honest, it doesn’t even live up to the competitors. You know the same competition Steve Jobs claimed the iPhone technology was 5 years or more ahead of.
Well, its 2010, not even 3 years after the famous 2007 iPhone announcement and your competition has not only matched you. But surpassed you.
WebOS is better. Android OS is better. And Windows 7 Mobile is going to be better.
All of those OS can multitask, are more open, and can or will do Flash, in addition to everything else iPhone OS does.
And don’t downplay those two omissions. Heck, even Steve Jobs himself couldn’t go 10 minutes in a prepared demo without stumbling across a blue block “missing flash” icon. How often you think a casual user is going to stumble across that in a sitting of an hour or two. Seems magical, alright.
It seems ever since Apple came up with the really great App Store concept, they’ve been getting lazy. Just putting together hardware, and telling Developers to do all the work for them.
The only thing that is going to distinguish iPad from iPod Touch is Apps. Plain and simple. So much so that long term sales of an iPad are going to hinge on the developer’s innovation. Not Apple’s.
Apple has an impressive amount of pre-orders for iPad to date, but they better have some tricks up their sleeve in iPhone OS 4.0
Because, if not, I know when my 2-year contract expires next year I’m going to be buying a device that doesn’t have a big apple logo on it. And I don’t think I’ll be the only one.
