Apple's new iPad blow by blow blog

[rblnr]

It's always been the UI with Apple and a focus on design, which while following function, is elegant so as to provide pleasure in daily use. And by this I mean aesthetics (hardware and software) as well as elegance in use. I dislike using Windows for several reasons, but one is that, though its gotten better, it's simply ugly to look at IMO. As an aside, the Metro UI is really nice to look at and interact with.

The ease of use is inextricably tied with the idea of an ecosystem that is not so much closed as simply not all-inclusive. Would I like to play FLAC via iTunes, sure. But I agree with Apple's choice of some limitations yielding greater ease of use and reliability. You're never buying just a piece of hardware from Apple, it's what make most spec comparisons meaningless.

There are rumors that Apple has commissioned 7.85" screens, we'll see. They spend enormous amounts of time on form factor and getting the size exactly right. I certainly wouldn't count on a larger iPhone screen -- they know how far an average thumb can reach and all te pocketability and pixel density issues of other sizes. 3.5"
is no accident. They also have little if any recent history of responding to what others are doing (see mobile Flash), and a smaller screen would be a response to the Fire as Steve Jobs is on record that smaller tablet sizes don't make sense. We'll see.

I'm in the same boat though, finding the iPhone often too small for some remote and automation tasks and the iPad too big.

 

[Steve Williams]

I'm in the same boat though, finding the iPhone often too small for some remote and automation tasks and the iPad too big.

how true. I wonder how many will use the cameral feature on the ipad which BTW is only 5 mega pixels vs the 8 MP on the iphone

 

[rblnr]

how true. I wonder how many will use the cameral feature on the ipad which BTW is only 5 mega pixels vs the 8 MP on the iphone

I don't think the iPad camera gets used much at all -- the form factor doesn't work for that as you're pointing out. To wit, they make a much bigger deal of the iPhone camera which ably replaces point 'n shoots for many people.

What I am eager to try out is iPhoto on the iPad. The touch interface is a natural for certain types of photo editing.

Friend of mine was hands on briefly yesterday, said the screen has to be seen to be understood btw.

 

[audioguy]

Mine is on the way. Lots of uses for my business.

The Gerlach family is highly committed to Apple products: 2 iPhones, 3 iPads, 2 notebooks and an iMac. (and that is just my wife and I)

I go way back with Apple: An Apple II in 1978; one of the 50,000 original Macs in 1984 (signed inside the case by the original Mac development team); and then a host of ongoing Mac upgrades. I did abandon ship for a while when they couldn't seem to get out of their own way. But we kissed and made up!!!!

 

[amirm]

is no accident. They also have little if any recent history of responding to what others are doing (see mobile Flash), and a smaller screen would be a response to the Fire as Steve Jobs is on record that smaller tablet sizes don't make sense. We'll see.

Jobs was great at many things, and one of them unfortunately was using marketing tactic of saying what you don't have, is not what is needed. He bad mouthed video when iPod was music only saying no one would have any use for video. At one conference he claimed that movies should not be released to the web until hard disks have built-in copy protection!

Here are some examples: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Steve_Jobs_No_Tablet_No_PDA_No_Cell_Phone_Lots_Of_iPods/

"Steve Jobs: No Tablet, No PDA, No Cell Phone, Lots Of iPods"

M [Walt Mossberg]: A lot of people think given the success youive had with portable devices, you should be making a tablet or a PDA.

J [Steve Jobs]: There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, "People couldnit type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this." "We look at the tablet and we think itis going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out . We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didnit think weid do well in the cell phone business. What weive done instead is weive written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA."

On reading books on devices: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/01/steve-jobs-peop/

"Steve Jobs: “People Don’t Read Anymore.”

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader will fail, Steve Jobs says, because Americans simply don’t read. From The New York Times:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

on Video:

“I’m not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny little screen,” Jobs said. “To paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘It’s the music, stupid, it’s the music!’ Music’s been around for a long time, will continue to be, it’s huge.”

Bottom line, he was a master of marketing, as much if not more than he was a master of technology.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Yep. He was dogmatic. At times highly inflexible. He could stubbornly rail against ideas he didn't like, and as your examples illustrate, he often arrogantly resisted things that he eventually embraced. But once he did, he often managed to leap-frog over his competitors and stay a generation or three ahead of them. Like I said, this kind of stuff can't really emerge from boardrooms, where scores are tallied and careers are built on cautious, consistent little wins and the obsessive avoidance of dramatic errors.

And you're right, he was a master of marketing. What marks a "master" in that arena is the vision to find things that people want, before they even know they want them themselves, and put them out there. Masters don't just meet consumer demands, they create it.

Tim

 

[Steve Williams]

And you're right, he was a master of marketing. What marks a "master" in that arena is the vision to find things that people want, before they even know they want them themselves, and put them out there. Masters don't just meet consumer demands, they create it.

How true Tim

 

[audioguy]

Like I said, this kind of stuff can't really emerge from boardrooms, where scores are tallied and careers are built on cautious, consistent little wins and the obsessive avoidance of dramatic errors.

Very, very well said. Which is why most really large companies (i.e. Samsung) will usually be followers (though the products they follow with may great products). Jobs (his personality, his brain, his fearlessness, his ego) made it work at Apple. If his replacement is the typical, hang onto your job, CEO, Apple will eventually go the way of other large companies

And you're right, he was a master of marketing. ............Masters don't just meet consumer demands, they create it.

Tim

Amen to that!!

 

[rblnr]

In Jobs' first go-round with Apple, they were nearly run out of business by MSFT. During some of that period, Mac had a GUI interface and MSFT was still DOS. There were obviously many factors involved, but the Mac was far easier to use but was getting trounced to the point of extinction in the marketplace. MSFT was by far the better marketer at that time and marketing usually wins over product quality. Take the 1984 ad: high concept, supercool, virtually no sales impact. Compare that to the ads we see from Apple today -- straightforward, product focused, and occasionally very direct (Mac vs. PC, which should have been done in round one). Point is, he learned and adapted and bacame a great marketer.

So yeah, Jobs was/Apple's the most successful marketer now, but it's backed up by the best products IMO so it's not just hot air. As noted above, Apple takes big swings and it will risk being wrong in a big way. (see Mac cube)t Most analysts thought the iPad would be a niche product and many predicted doom. For the iPhone too. (see Steve Ballmer) In those cases they lead the market and it came. In stuff like video on the iPod (which really only became relevant w/the iPod touch/iPhone size screens and his comment was from 2003), they reacted to what the market told them after marketing against it. That's pragmatic, not dogmatic which didn't happen in round one.

Another example that might not have happened in the first round:

http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ores_as_targeting_creative_professionals.html

a reconsideration and changing of mind. Valuing the expertise of others.

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Clueless alert. Are Apple's "new" product announcements over-hyped? Not by Apple. Their self-promotion pales compared to the latest Marvel Movie. Are they over-hyped by the news? Evidently. Even sour old Andy Rooney wannabees, on the fringes of mass media, can't seem to resist giving Apple a few free moments of advertising to tell everyone that they don't get it. Why? Because Apple ran a press conference and put their new product up on their own website? You got that when Lays launched a reduced salt chip. Did everybody, including people who thought reduced salt chips were not news, run each other down to make news out of it? No. Did they do it because Apple's incredible marketing machine got to them? Apple's remarkable marketing machine didn't have a word to say until they announced they had a press event coming up and declined to discuss its content.

Got to be something else.

Tim

 

[Steve Williams]

Could be expectation bias

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

Clueless alert. Are Apple's "new" product announcements over-hyped? Not by Apple. Their self-promotion pales compared to the latest Marvel Movie. Are they over-hyped by the news? Evidently. Even sour old Andy Rooney wannabees, on the fringes of mass media, can't seem to resist giving Apple a few free moments of advertising to tell everyone that they don't get it. Why? Because Apple ran a press conference and put their new product up on their own website? You got that when Lays launched a reduced salt chip. Did everybody, including people who thought reduced salt chips were not news, run each other down to make news out of it? No. Did they do it because Apple's incredible marketing machine got to them? Apple's remarkable marketing machine didn't have a word to say until they announced they had a press event coming up and declined to discuss its content.

Got to be something else.

Tim

And what in your expert opinion would that be?

 

[rblnr]

Don't know about Tim, but my answer:

Game changing experiences

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Don't know that my opinion is an expert on this subject but it seems to me that the company has put out so many seriously great toys, that their remarkable, competition-crushing, category-dominating successes have been many and frequent enough that now the press is breathless to report it when they sneeze...or maybe they're reluctant to yawn, even at an upgrade, for fear of looking foolish when it becomes the kind of upgrade that puts Apple three generations ahead of the closest follower in a relatively new category that suddenly turns huge.

That (described above) is exactly the kind of thing Apple has done repeatedly, since Jobs' return. They didn't invent the MP3 player but they own the market. They didn't invent the smart phone but they captured the biggest market share. They certainly didn't invent music retailing, but they became the world's largest music retailer in what seemed like an instant, They didn't invent the tablet, but we've completely forgotten whoever did in the face of the iPad. Is it marketing? I don't know...is stunning product development that defines entire categories of products marketing? Maybe. Being a marketing guy, I'd like to think so , but I suspect it's a bit more than that and I know it is news. And this guy yawns at his peril.

Tim

 

[Steve Bruzonsky]

My wife has started to use my iPad 2 (which I use as a MPOD controller for my external USB hard drive based Bryston BDP-1 media player system) to play Facebook Scrabble. Came home from the office today and she had it down to 7% charge. WOW!

Good think I online ordered an Ipad 3rd generation yesterday, which will arrive at my law office on 3-16th. HA!

 

[amirm]

Boy, it is literally work like this that makes cry with no ability to write . Such charm in telling the story. With good bit of insight thrown in there for good measure. "Going after the fat wallets of the west?" Indeed. Who else can justify spending hundreds on a phone/tablet and then proceed to pay $50/month for data. And to think we used to pay $15/month to have phone connection at home and got the set for free.....

 

[amirm]

Don't know that my opinion is an expert on this subject but it seems to me that the company has put out so many seriously great toys, that their remarkable, competition-crushing, category-dominating successes have been many and frequent enough that now the press is breathless to report it when they sneeze...or maybe they're reluctant to yawn, even at an upgrade, for fear of looking foolish when it becomes the kind of upgrade that puts Apple three generations ahead of the closest follower in a relatively new category that suddenly turns huge.

Here is a hypothetical for you. Let's say the identical product was designed and developed by LG -- you know, the company who used to be called "Lucky Goldstar." You think it would get the same reception?

My answer is no. There are iPad Android tablets gathering dust. The iPad, of all Apple products, needed hype to sell. When it was launched, it was a solution looking for a problem. Apple magic halo got them past it. Other companies didn't have this force field and got stuck in the mud.

Jobs solved a lot of hairy problems like this. He got HD content from Fox even though his device lacked the type of security the studio would normally require. Let's let the Fox studio executive, Jim Gianopulos, tell the story in his own words: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jim-gianopulos-steve-jobs-dead-248311

"I'm coming to Paros." Hearing those words was much scarier than you'd think.

During the spring and summer of 2006, Steve Jobs was negotiating with Fox and other studios to expand iTunes from selling digital music and TV shows to selling feature films. I had known Steve for several years, and as usual, he had very strong views -- in this instance, about how movies on iTunes should be priced, marketed and presented to his growing base of devoted followers.

Unfortunately, many of those views were inconsistent with existing media, and as was often the case, he thought the studio guys were Luddites (if not idiots). I was one of them.

We spent many hours on the phone and in person hashing out ways to reconcile the new offering with our concerns about it. We were very eager to make it work -- but nowhere near as eager as Steve, who wanted to corral all the studios and make one of his bold and exciting announcements, which he'd scheduled for September. We wanted to change things; he wanted to change them now.

We argued and debated back and forth into the summer, and as August arrived, we remained a fair distance apart. So, as a respite from Relentless Steve, I sneaked off to my annual retreat on the tiny island of Antiparos, near Paros in Greece.

I thought I was safe. But not from Steve. He stalked me, eventually sending this e-mail:
From: Steve Jobs
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:51:12 -0700
To: Jim Gianopulos
Cc: Steve Jobs
Subject: I'm coming to Paros
Jim,
We need to talk and if that's not possible over the phone or via e-mail, then I need to come to Paros and go for a walk on the beach with you and resolve this. The time is now to begin creating a new online distribution vehicle for movies, and Apple is the company to do it. I need your help.
How do I find you once I get to the airport on Paros?
Thanks,
Steve
He never made it to Paros, but we eventually made a deal, and it evolved into a great friendship, one that I will always cherish.

A couple of years later, Steve invited me to join him at MacWorld to announce the launch of VOD on iTunes, which we had also worked on together. It was a serious badge of honor for a civilian, but it petrified me. In the green room, before Steve went onstage to present to the 6,000 people hanging on his every word, I told him, "I don't know how you do it, walking back and forth out there for an hour with no notes or teleprompter in front of all those people." He said, "It's easy, you just imagine you have a few friends sitting around your living room and you're telling them what's new."
I used that advice that day, and in every public speech since. But no one did it like Steve, because he knew what those 6,000 people and millions more wanted, even before they did."

Serious badge of honor for a civilian? A studio executive uses those words to describe being on stage with Steve? Don't tell me that is all about building toys . Let's hope he has started enough that it no longer requires this kind of force field to keep going. I can tell you Cook wouldn't be able to get this kind of treatment from anyone. Not even close.

 

[Steve Williams]

I can tell you Cook wouldn't be able to get this kind of treatment from anyone. Not even close.

Not that I disagree but Cook was carefully chosen by Jobs to carry on his legacy so for me time will tell. I believe that Jobs had a floor map of the company's developments for years to come and these will be rolled out without losing a beat

 

[FrantzM]

Boy, it is literally work like this that makes cry with no ability to write . Such charm in telling the story. With good bit of insight thrown in there for good measure. "Going after the fat wallets of the west?" Indeed. Who else can justify spending hundreds on a phone/tablet and then proceed to pay $50/month for data. And to think we used to pay $15/month to have phone connection at home and got the set for free.....

Where did John post this? I need to quote it .. A few questions before I buy one

Still no USB?
Same Printing Problems?
Still no Adobe Flash?

While I admire Apple interface and all that I believe we should be more critical toward the failing of this wonderful device. It can only help or force them make better products and/or to make even more money