A debate will rage about the new Apple tablet with some people hating it, and some loving it, right up until Apple produces its first quarterly numbers, or ahead of them, tells the world how many it has sold.
Then the world will be able to work out if Apple has created another economic miracle device. If we had to say whether or not it had right now, we’d say yes. On balance, and after some thought. The US stock market felt the same way, first cutting Apple stock on the bald facts of the announcement, asking who will buy this, and then lifting off, as Jobs rammed home his multiple messages.
When Apple created the iPod back in 2001 not many people got it, but then again few were watching. Now half the world (perhaps 20% of the world) are looking on with bated breathe. To them Apple could launch a dead cat in a basket and they’d go out, buy it and sing its praises. The other half (or 80%) wonder what all the fuss is about, but slowly more of them get drawn in.
Let’s apply our first rule of consumer devices. People must want it, be able to afford it and see someone who has one. Well at $499, more or less every US schoolkid can get Ma or Pa to shell out for one. And they want it just because it’s a bigger better screen, showing off the same Apps they already love, to a bigger audience. And someone will be sitting in the railway carriage, bus, the school playground or at work, reading a newspaper, a book or watching a film on the iPad, in every public space, the moment it has hit the streets. It qualifies on all scores to be a consumer hit. But what it is exactly?
Sometime in 2003 we found ourselves trying to explain to a group of Hewlett Packard executives, that one day we would have exploding PCs. Back then we were predicating it on the idea that you would have a keyboard, and storage and a screen at home, and one at work, but you wouldn’t carry them about with you. Instead, they and all the other accessories, would stay put and some kind of core device which was good for working on the move, would be the only part to travel with you everywhere you go.
What we thought was going to cause this was the speed at which the accessories could talk to one another, as short range PAN technologies came of age. We were laughed out of the room, because what I had described was possible yes, but why was it desirable? It wasn’t, at least not then or to that audience. Portability and ease of use had not been shown to be a priority back then.
What we had actually described, though we only knew it today, was the iPad, though it took me a while to become convinced as I waded through my first thoughts. It’s too heavy, it’s too big and it will probably, at the end of this presentation, be too expensive. But instead of the $999 we were all worried about at the end, it wasn’t and prices start at $499, just a smidgin over the top end Kindles and around the price of most decent netbooks. Steve Jobs once boasted that ‘We don’t know how to make PCs that cheap’. Well he does now.
Apple already has accessories for the iPhone, and there are companies set up with the idea of making more, so once you ‘accessorize’ the iPad to death, it will become whatever you want it to be. It can have an attachable camera, speakers, screens, more keyboards, even bluetooth headsets for speaking on Skype.
Quite clearly this device can be seen as an ADDITION to the number of devices that you have to carry around with you, because you need your phone (most of the time) and you need a laptop (some of the time), but at $499 for the low end product, for some people, this device will be all they ever need.
Immediately two camps sprung up online ‘ those that raved about the product, and those who hated it. I am moving, after a little thought from the hate camp, into the rave camp. It’s not too heavy, it’s not too big as long as you have something like a school bag to carry it around in, and at that price it will sell in high enough volumes purely on killing off the Amazon Kindle.
What the iPad IS, is fast, it weighs 1.5 pounds, is just 0.5 inches thick and has a 9.7 inch LED-backlit LCD display which uses In-Plane Switching to give a wider viewing angle. In fact the iPad is mostly that, just a display. It’s too big and too heavy for your pocket, but the flip side of that is that the 9.7 inch screen has a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution display which is capacitive and multi-touch in the same way as an iPhone. In fact slightly improved. It comes with between 16 GB and 64 GB of flash storage, has a speaker, microphone, and accelerometer but also GPS and a compass and Bluetooth connectivity. But its main connectivity is Wi-Fi, and there is a more expensive version which has a 3G cellular link. It will run most App Store programs, has its own downloadable SDK, and can swap games and Apps already downloaded from an iPhone or iPod Touch.
But Apple doesn’t design devices, it designs experiences. So when you see it demonstrated you see the ease of use, the UI, the way the gesture controls work effortlessly. There is a moment when a demo is turned over to face the audience. The picture on it re-renders so that instead of being upside down and right to left, it flips right way up and the right way round, so the person you are showing it to gets the same experience as you. It is these neat touches ‘ in this case a kind of second generation accelerometer understanding – which make the difference.
Consumers don’t care it it’s a phone or an oversized iPod Touch or a netbook, they just care that it works and it looks cool and they want one, can afford one, and see someone that has one.
The chip which drives the iPad is designed in-house, presumably with the help of the PA Semiconductor team which Apple acquired, to give it tighter integration and it has the type of power that top of the range 1 GHz multi-core ARM processors have, such as those from Freescale and Qualcomm with its snapdragon. Apple calls it is A4 chip. To Qualcomm this must be the ultimate smartbook and it probably has one ARM core (we’d guess it has four in total) devoted to processing all the UI gestures, but what the hell, it’s worth it.
In doing this, Apple has taken a leaf from Nokia’s book. Design your own chips and once the cat is out of the bag, work with your favorite chip designer, in this case either Samsung or potentially Qualcomm, share intellectual property with them and then it’s their problem.
There are no immediate losers in this launch, because it’s not quite automatic just how many of these devices will ship, but we would look for a drying up in Amazon Kindle shipments, and the Sony eBook readers could die a death too.
There were idiots out there who’s first thought was that it didn’t have a camera. How many notebooks or netbooks do? Well a few have a web cam, but it makes no sense waving a 1.5 pound glass screen around and pointing it at someone and asking, ‘Say cheese.’ Instead there will be camera accessories, which auto upload and sync, but they are to come and probably from another brand other than Apple.
The video format will be Apple’s own, and at launch there will be no Adobe Flash, and given that the iPhone still hasn’t got it, it may never get Apple’s blessing.
The device can come with an AT&T $30 unlimited data plan which can be 3G plus free WiFi at AT&T’s wireless hot spots, or just work with Wi-Fi.
As an advertising platform it is something else, though the infrastructure is not in place for that yet. Advertising is something that the iPhone is rapidly encouraging, within Apps, and something that Apple just addressed by buying its own mobile advertising server company, to compete with the dominant AdMob,
What’s missing from today’s announcement is a streaming TV service, something we have been told to expect in the Summer, and a deal to deliver some of the biggest name US newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal. We suspect that these things will be rolled out as this devices warms to the market.
The iPod comes with an optional detachable keyboard or an onscreen keyboard almost the size of a netbook keyboard and by readying a special version of iTunes and also of iWorks (for $9.99 from the App Store), it can buy music over the 3G link directly and it can be used like a netbooks with documents, for browsing the web, sending email, watching videos, looking at and storing photos, playing games and reading eBooks.
The iPad is available in late March and can do everything in either portrait and landscape mode and auto switches by simply turning it. When you read it looks like a book, when you touch the video screen, it jumps back and forth between widescreen and regular. It organizes pictures into albums without being asked and shows YouTube in HD. IT will also become an iTunes music player.
Turn an iPad book around with a gesture and the back of the book becomes the Apple book store, the iBookstore, compatible with the epub book standard, but not using the high definition electronic ink display of the Kindle. Apple so far has signed distribution deals with Penguin, Harper-Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and the Hachette Book Group.
Right now our biggest reservations are that iPod sales fell off during the previous quarter, going backwards, we think for the first time. This device has to replace that revenue as it tails off, and more, and although we think it will, there will remain haters of both all things Apple, and this device in particular. Once it offers its own TV service, streamed, not downloaded, then perhaps it is also a portable TV, and then all resistance will fold, except from one quarter.
There will be Android and possibly Chrome versions of this device out within months, and they will look very similar, because now the iPad is out of the bag, their designers know what they are shooting for. Some devices will be well designed and may work the same, and they may also come with an App Store, but will that include a music store? And where both are present, there will be very few players that also have a games store (Nokia perhaps). And where they have a games store, will they also have a video store? And even then they will be laboring behind the early market lead of the iPad
Of course, the battery life is 10 hours, same as we’d expect from any ARM based smartbook and Apple reckons that it can be charged 1,000 times and still hold 80% of its original charge. Oh that’s another thing this will hit, netbooks.
The 16GB model will sell for $499, there will be a 32 GB model for $599 and a 64 GB model for $699. The Wi-Fi + 3G models of iPad will be available in April in the US and selected countries for a suggested retail price of $629 for the 16GB model, $729 for the 32GB model and $829 for the 64GB model.
Like an onion we expect more and more of the marketing behind this device and its multiple functions to unravel, like an onion, with many deeper layers.