Giant Meh Redux
Undoubtedly the most humorous thing about the iPad’s, umm, lukewarm reception (to put it kindly) is the Apple fanboy response which has been, largely, to post every quote where anyone ever said some Apple product wouldn’t work. Some people hated the original iPod (which sold like 8 units total). Some people said the original iPhone (also an underpeformer) wasn’t going to be that big.
This, to the fanboys, is practically evidence of its impending success. Of course, nobody is pointing out quotes from people who said the Apple TV or Macbook Air were duds too.
I think there’s a large difference between the iPhone and iPod and the iPad. When the iPod came out, people were using MP3 players. A lot of them. I’d already had a few different models by then. It was a small portion of the eventual market, for sure, but nobody ever thought to themselves “Why would anyone want a tiny device that can store every song you’ve ever heard, half of which you downloaded for free on Kazaa, on it?” They debated whether people would buy that device from Sony or Creative or maybe Apple, but not that people wanted it.
Same with the iPhone. The smart phone market had existed for years before its release. Nobody with half a brain ever said “Why would anyone want to be able to surf the web and answer emails on the go?” People were already doing that. It was more like “Why would anyone pay $600 with a 2 year contract for this?” or “Will anyone switch to AT&T for this?” or “Will a virtual keyboard be even remotely tolerable?”. Etc.
The question with the iPad is: “Does anyone want a device in between a smart phone and a laptop?” It’s not an issue of who they want to buy it from, or how much it costs, or what features it has. It’s whether, like the Apple TV, it needs to exist at all. If you go down a list of features and compare it to HP or Sony or whoever else jumps onto this market, it might well be like every other Apple product. It might look inferior on paper, and outsell them 10:1 anyway. That I would not put past Apple.
Almost as humorous as the twisted logic is the freetard reaction which is, humorously, that Apple is (or may be becoming) evil. On the one hand, it’s hilarious to see the farm animals, who’ve been decrying Microsoft for far less egregious things than the App Store for over a decade, react in real time when they realize the pigs have become human. Four legs good, two interns capriciously rejecting fart apps better.
I didn’t buy it about Microsoft then, and I don’t buy it about Apple now. They’re just doing what corporations do, trying to make the most money they can. That’s their job, and this is how they think they’ll accomplish it. If their tightly-controlled user experience does become too restrictive, people won’t buy it and Windows, Android, Ubuntu, or whatever else will win out. There’s not good and evil, only optimal and suboptimal, and time will tell which Apple’s chosen.
