The Apple iPad
January 28th, 2010
Yesterday was the biggest and possibly most anticipated Apple announcement ever. The much anticipated tablet PC from Apple. Rumours were flying around what it’ll be and how it’ll change the way we think about personal computing. It should be no surprise that the actual announcement came as a bit of a disappointment. After all, no device really could live up to the hype that surrounded this tablet.
The criticisms I’ve heard were usually in the ballpark of gross oversimplifications like, “oh so it’s a giant iPod Touch,” or “What does it do that my iPhone or laptop doesn’t?” I think it’s important to note that none of Apple’s big successful products were really that revolutionary or new. Before the first iPod, there were tons of MP3 players. I owned 2 before the iPod even came out. Apple realized that the MP3 player was a device that should be successful but wasn’t so they fixed it. Apple made the iPod into what an MP3 player should be. However, when the iPod first came out, it wasn’t wildly successful. There were the usual complaints and sales weren’t terribly good until about 2 years after its release.
The original iPhone had a lot to be desired. It couldn’t do MMS messages, no apps, slow 2G network, couldn’t run multiple apps at the same time. If you simply compared the vital stats of the iPhone to a Blackberry, then on paper the Blackberry would appear to be the better device. However Apple realizes that pure functionality isn’t what makes a product desirable, despite what people might think. The iPhone quickly became among the most popular phones and successive iterations have perfected it. In fact, people like it so much that they’re willing to use a less than optimal network just to get access to the iPhone. That’s saying a lot!
Apple knows that what people say they want is rarely what they really want. Facebook knows this too. How many times has Facebook changed its layout much to the chagrin of the Facebook users? I remember when the live feed came out there were protest groups on Facebook saying that they should go back to the way it was. Facebook did the right thing and ignored its users because 2 months later, nobody was complaining about it.
What’s the moral of this story? If you design a product based on what the user says they want and you design it exactly to their specifications, you may be designing something that they’ll never actually use. Sometimes it takes a little foresight to create a product that a user would want but doesn’t know that they want yet. Apple and Facebook both do a great job at delivering something that people will want but don’t know it yet. Both of these companies have to pull the user kicking and screaming into new technology.
It should be no surprise that after the announcement that there were only complaints circling the blogs. It’s easy to reduce criticisms to things like, “giant iPhone har har har”, but this sort of criticism isn’t helpful. Reductionist arguments always fail to address if the device will be successful or not. I remember when the iPhone first came out and there were reductionist pictures of iPods duct taped to cell phones circling the Internet. “iPod + cell phone = iPhone. har har har.” Perhaps you’ve heard things like, “Oh so it’s a big expensive iPod that can make phone calls?” How many of those people now own iPhones?
A more common argument against the iPad is that it doesn’t do anything that my other devices don’t. Right now, this is definitely true. Then again, did the iPhone ever do something that other phones didn’t? I think the only function the original iPhone had that other phones didn’t was the multi-touch display. While this feature was cool, the missing features of the iPhone totally outweighed it. Yet, despite this, the iPhone is a wildly successful device. Apple doesn’t create devices that do things that we couldn’t before, it just makes them accessible enough to even bother. Apple realizes that quality can often times trump quantity.
Because we’re human, we’re doomed to compare. Dan Arielly illustrated a bunch of interesting studies in Predictably Irrational showing that we make irrational decisions in the presence of a comparison. How many of you out there compared the iPad to a netbook? to a laptop? to an iPhone? Yes, you did, don’t lie. Slashdot made this mistake comparing the iPod to a Nomad back in the day. The question of the iPad’s success won’t be a simple comparison chart comparing it to the Asus line of netbooks. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that a product’s success is determined by the how it stacks up in features. The iPod and iPhone should be proof of that.