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The State of iPad Satisfaction
harrymcc writes "We know that the iPad is selling like hotcakes, but how satisfied are the people who buy it? Over at Technologizer, we conducted a survey of 6,000 iPad early adopters. There are a few places where they were critical — the majority, for instance, aren't happy with Apple's App Store approval process. Overall, however, they're overwhelmingly upbeat."
Other than the fact that I'm stuck with AT&T, I really like it.
Why would most end users care about the App Store approval process? If you're surveying developers say that you're surveying developers. Oh wait, is it just that the Slashdot summary is wrong? Thought so.
Don't survey a subset of the users and then generalize that to all users. It's inherently unfair.
(no, I don't have an iPad and probably never will)
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/11/dell-mini-5-we-have-it/
Dell tends to make pretty good devices (contrary to the article yesterday), that are very usefull and well designed. So hopefully this will start a good series of android style tablets. This probably wont hurt the apple market but at least it will deliver a useful tablet to those of us who don't want to fight the app store and want some more options.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Where I work, we were really upset there was no way to use wireshark on the ipad. So we made cloudshark, and I bet a lot of other people are doing identical things -- the beauty of jQuery and other APIs like that is that you can replace 90% of a regular desktop app with a simple web page. There are probably tons of other examples of this sort of thing. There's all sorts of CSS hooks for ipad to accomplish the new modes of use, scolling, double fingers, et cetera. It's frankly very fun.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
How many users even know about the App Store *approval process*. Hmm? I'm an iPhone developer, and it bugs me to no end. But how the hell would an end user know? They have no way of interacting with the App Store's approval process, just the "storefront", so to speak. If a large enough number of respondents were dissatisfied with that, then I question who they solicited.
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
Why would the average iPad consumer care about the app approval process? The average iPad buyer is not a developer. If that's the best complaint that they can manufacture in this article, I'm inclined to say this is an anti-Apple article with questionable researching techniques. Although, I didn't RTFA, so maybe I missed something.
I have an iPad at home, and while I'm a developer by trade, I do not develop iPad/iPhone apps.
I have two major gripes (and they are easy to guess):
1) Flash support. This is purely a practical objection (suspending my philosophical objections). This is a neat toy for having around the house. It is the #1 way my kids browse. There are a lot of child oriented sites that need flash ( my younger kids love pbskids.org ). If apple succeeds in driving flash from the web and everybody uses html5 then I'd be fine, but this will take forever.
2) Printing. I never missed it much on my iPhone, but when you are using the iPad it is hard not to think of it as a "computer", and a computer should be able to print. There are some apps that help here, but there needs to be universal support. I'm sitting on the couch reading an e-mail. Next to me hidden under an end table is my wifi laser printer. I really would like to print an email. I'd also like to print out map/directions to take on a trip. This really needs to be on the iOS list (even if it needs a daemon / iTunes on a computer to avoid having to load printer drivers in the iPad).
I haven't started developing for the iPad, although after being a user for the past 2 months I honestly think it's an outstanding platform to focus attention on.
The UI is buttery smooth. This is one thing EVERY other device I've put hands on doesn't even come close to getting right. Android is wonderful, and I love it - but the UI just isn't as fluid and responsive. This may not change how the device works but it certainly changes how you perceive the device is working. I see it every time someone uses an Android phone (myself included): click, click again because it didn't give you immediate feedback or response. Turn the device sideways, wait a couple seconds, flip it back and forth a couple times because the display didn't rotate. Things like that are minor in 'tech, but huge in usability.
The tougher process of getting an app INTO the iTunes app store I honestly think is helping weed out the lower grade fluff we find in the Android market. How many times have you gone looking through apps, found something that looked pretty good, installed it, and it was crap? How many reviews on the Android Market read something like this: Force closes, one star!. It's the same problem with all the various free Windows software that's everywhere on the net. You have more choice, but you have more choices of crap. If people are going to spend the time, money, and effort to get an app into Apple's store, they're more likely to make sure it's something that's worth being there. They want to get paid, after all.
Getting back to end-users, of which I've been exclusively since this thing launched -- it really is awesome. I carry it instead of a laptop nearly every time I would have taken my laptop. I carry it now when I wouldn't have carried anything before, simply because I can. Then again, if I had an iPhone I'd probably leave it home more often. Regardless, the beauty is being able to do real work on it (email, web-based enterprise apps, etc.) without having to take anything else with me. No power cord, no problem - I get a full day PLUS worth of power out of the battery. Battery life + 3G + usable screen size (1024x768 means my work webapps fit perfectly) + a very usable on-screen keyboard = happy camper.
I'm an avid geocacher and I've found the GPS accuracy in the iPad to be better than the iPhone, and comparable to my Garmin 60csx (which is more-or-less the gold standard). I use the iPad for a lot of other reasons (the kids like to watch movies or play games on it while we're driving out to a forest preserve) but I was really pleasantly surprised to see that I could pretty much rely on it to get me to the spot.
I'm waiting for Otterbox to come out with their Defender case so I can keep it out all the time through the woods, instead of putting it back in the backpack on the chance I trip over a log or something. The iPad might not be as compact as the iPhone or Garmin, but it beats a day of DNFs.
Surveying a subset and generalizing the population from which it's drawn is what we call inferential statistics; it's a cornerstone of modern science and social research.
There may be some significant problems with the survey design, however. There's no information about how the survey was conducted (internet? email? something else?), or how the respondents for it were chosen (self-selection? something else?). The information's a bit to sketchy to tell how reliable the survey is.
I have a 16Gb iPad 3G and I must say that their survey matches my experience.
I don't care about a camera on it. Front or back. And find the only things I wish it had were native print function, and built in SD card reader. The 3G service is OK except at work where my building seems to be some sort of Faraday cage for anything radio related.
I was kind of surprised that iBooks wasn't showing as highly rated as I thought. For me that is the killer app. It makes access to the Project Gutenberg material flat out painless. I know that there are other ways I could get those titles on there and read them if it wasn't built into the app, but this makes it easy.
I want to shoot the messenger!
We aren’t trying to capture a demographically representative sample of all iPad owners and we didn’t normalize the results. The opinions you’re about to read reflect only the experiences of the folks who took our survey–readers of Technologizer and other sites (such as Daring Fireball) that linked to it. Which is fine by us: We were dying to learn what you thought.
Not scientific, not normalized, not statistically meaningful.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Check DealExtreme.
So far the feedback from most forums is that it sucks. Build quality is all over the place. The touch screen is lacking multi-touch. (Different technology). Some people have had theirs die completely after a few days of use. The battery life is horrible compared to the iPad and it's running Android 1.6.
But it is cheap.
I was about 80-90% satisfied at launch; I could use my bluetooth keyboard from my ancient Palm, take it with me as a laptop substitute when traveling for work or personal, and in a crunch write a report in the notepad app and e-mail it to a co-worker to format and PDF. Now, I'm closer to 95% satisfied after getting a spreadsheet/word processor app and a few other gems.
What I hate is the absurd organization and search capability of the AppStore. Yes, I know about 3rd party tracking/review sites, yes, I am willing to waste hours searching... and ultimately, yes, I am willing to pay $5-10 to try something that may not meet my expectations.
But, I am quickly getting to the point where expensive ($30-80) apps have reviews that state they don't live up to stated functionality, and it is becoming impossible to really experiment with different use-cases.
By far though, I get more satisfaction using the device as a content-creation vehicle rather than a consumption device. Consumption is lost on the ads that cannot be blocked that in turn screw up the page formatting.
(Oh, and it pisses the living sh!t out of me that Slashdot jumps down half a page when you expand a comment!)
And what particular non-corporation made device are you surfing the internet with today? CPU was hand-crafted by an artisan was it?
Poor old iPad owners. Fancy buying something and finding some time later that you like 98% of the other buyers are satisfied with it. Must be truly awful. How terrible for them it must be to be so excited about a new piece of technology that they stand in line to buy it. If only they could have spent that time whining on Slashdot instead.
The story pulls a clever choice of data -- "the majority aren't happy with Apple's App Store approval process", when in reality the vast majority (85%ish) of people answered with the two answers that are the most positive towards the app store (Not a problem at all and minor problem). The fact is that the possible answers that they could give were skewed towards the negative:
Not a problem at all
Minor problem
Major problem
Unacceptable
So, your summary basically says that "of the four possible answers, the majority of people picked from three of them", which is not all that impressive of a feat. Suppose the possible answers were instead:
I prefer to have apps reviewed before purchasing or downloading them
I'm neutral on the app store
Minor problem
Major problem
Unacceptable
By adding a positive answer, rather than a slightly above neutral answer, you change the skew of the response. By have a great majority of negative answers, someone who has not completely formed their opinion will be more likely to say, "huh, I had never thought of it before, but since there are so many negative possible answers, there must be a problem."
Huh??
What what you do with it then... put it in a beige-colored folder, and file it away alphabetically in that beige-colored file-cabinet atop which you keep your tri-cornered hat?
FFS. These people are _early adopters_. They'll eat shit, thank you and grin happily.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
"the majority for instance, aren't happy with Apple's App Store approval process" The majority? Really? "Forty-one percent think it’s a minor issue" and 43% don't think it's an issue at all. So 84% barely care or don't. Chances are the 16% who think it's a major/unacceptable problem are irate developers or people who just hate any kind of controlling authority. And actually it looks like they can't count since about 2-3% had no opinion: 84 + 16 + 3 = 103% What I read into this is consumers really don't care about the approval process. Why would they? They have 200,000+ apps and more flooding in every day.
Good sarcasm is timely, relevant, and factual. Yours meets none of those criteria. Oh and usually (but not always funny).
People haven't had time to get tired of them yet. There are lots and lots of cool gadgets in the world and for a wide variety of them, they are cool for a short time. Only a very select few in history have emerged from the pile as "indispensable." Among these are the palm pilot and later the blackberry. iPod is a very risky move because it is significantly larger than things that fit in pockets.
I am not sure you would find a single iPad buyer who felt they were sticking it to the man. Most of them were buying a consumer electronic device they felt would be useful and after using it for a month or two, they found that it was useful. This annoys the crap out of you because you had some strange unnatural urge to see it fail, so you denigrate all those people. Millions of people have purchased iPads and our happy with them. If you chose to believe it is because they are not as smart as you, they have medications that will help with your delusions.
Indeed they love their new owners. The Foxconn plant was scary! Bodies flying everywhere.
98% satisfaction rating says that the technology of the device is good and is keeping customers happy after purchase. You are the one with the problem, not them. You don't know how good these devices are. Nor why people buy them.
*yawn* I don't know why you're worried, people like you keep telling everyone how much better Android is and how it's only a matter of months before Apple is eclipsed and irrelevant.
But whatever. If it wasn't for Apple and their iOS, Android would probably still be the same crappy blackberry ripoff that it was when Google bought it, actual useful tablets would still be years away, and the US mobile phone landscape would still totally suck, instead of just mostly sucking like it does now.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The conclusion of the article is that people really, really love their iPads for a whole bunch of reasons, and that they're less than completely delighted with a few aspects, one of which was the App store issue (and the biggest single response there was "it's a minor problem"). Anti-Apple article? Not hardly.
Your combination of ignorance and spittle-spewing irrational vitriol makes you a target-rich environment for anyone armed with a bit of logic and a few facts.
>>You have to face it sooner or later... Apple makes its money by being a lifestyle brand, like Levi or American Apparel or Gucci.
Only a /. geek would sneer at "the masses" buying a "lifestyle brand" instead of something that "OMG! Can be rooted, overclocked, and turned into a Beowulf cluster" for the sheer geekiness of it. I'd bet money that you have more than one lifestyle brand product in your house. You just don't like this particular one. There are plenty of reasons why a technically minded person would want a Mac and even an iPad. You've just never bothered to figure out what they are, and if you don't have the drive to educate yourself, don't expect anyone else to do it for you.
>>That's why it has pathetic enterprise support
Apple never claimed to have make the enterprise one of its key markets. The enterprise made a decision two decades ago to go with IBM/Windows and not Apple; that done, why should Apple now spend all its time and money chasing a market segment that made its preferences perfectly clear? Just because they don't support your preferred market niche doesn't somehow make them evil.
>>tries to lock out competition for it's platform
Or, you know, just tries to make a serious effort at keeping trojans, viruses, phishing, badly-written apps that crash incessantly and don't perform as advertised, and all kinds of other nastiness off the platform as a service to its customers? I can't wait to start read all the /. comments that whining about malware screwing up their Android tablets next year.
>>That's why it's a walled garden filled mostly with petty video games.
Ironic, given that most anti-Mac critics often cited the lack of games as a reason why not to buy one. Now iOS has an absurd number of games on par with the Nintendo DS and its suddenly cause for criticism. There's no winning with you people. BTW, more than 50% of the 200,000 iOS apps in the App Store aren't games. But you obviously don't own an iOS device and so can't search the App Store, so I guess you wouldn't know that.
>>It's an appliance for people who don't like the open endedness of computers.
Yes, it's an appliance. Appliances by definition aren't meant to be "open." You really want a cheap, open product from Apple? Buy a Mac Mini and root it to your heart's content. But my guess is that you don't care about openness at the moment so much as you just care about bashing Apple.
>>Apple users skim on the surface of computing.
Except, you know, for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Apple developers; or the hundreds of thousands of IT Techs who prefer to use Macs to run their networks. Or these guys:
http://www.apple.com/science/
Clearly, they're a bunch of idiots who can't find a power button without RFTM. Way to overgeneralize there, buddy.
>>The problem is that Apple does not want standards, it wants control.
Yeah, that's why Apple just released it's iOS FaceTime protocol as an open standard. And that's why Apple makes Unix the foundation for both MacOS and iOS. And that's why Apple integrated over a hundred open source projects into the OS. And that's why Apple drives public development of Clang and LLVM and Webkit and...oh, forget it. Just visit this page:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
Not that I expect you to want to educate yourself on Apple's considerable contributions to open source.
>>It does not want everyone to create art, it wants everyone to buy Final Cut and use it on a Mac Pro to create art.
And Apple does what to stop people from creating art using something other than Macs and iPads? Burns down paintbrush factories? Congratulations, you've officially crossed the line into non-sensical ranting.
There is nothing wrong with Apple wanting people to use th
iPod is a very risky move because it is significantly larger than things that fit in pockets.
But also more useful.
The killer app is actually traveling, where you want something substantially larger than an iPhone but without the bulk of a laptop or need to charge while in transit.
And around the house, they are easier for casual use than a laptop. Basically they do fill a useful niche in computing, and from this peak you can see the place where they replace laptops for a lot of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most of them were buying a consumer electronic device they felt would be useful and after using it for a month or two, they found that it was useful.
Except that this little moral fable ignores some well-known empirical psychology that Apple uses heavily in their branding. Apple devices, with their sleek aesthetics and sexy image, are appealing for reasons that have nothing to do with their functionality.
People feel good about owning them not (just) becauase they're useful, but because they are envied and admired. People feel good about owning stuff that other people wish they could own too. And people who don't see the value in paying a premium for that denigrate such devices as being overpriced toys.
There's nothing wrong with any of this, but it's important to recognize that this dynamic has nothing to do with what your average TrueGeek would consider the "functional" aspects of the device.
An iPad doesn't do anything (for me) that my netbook won't do (cue people who Just Don't Get It lining up to tell me I'm wrong [yes, there's a pun in there]). But I've seen the way iPaddies show off their new toy, and felt both envy and irritation with them, just like everything we know about the psychology of social factors in success would lead me to expect.
This is the genius of Jobs: his company makes products that are hard to be indifferent to. Everyone wants to own one because they we'd get to be the center of attention too, and this is the primary determinant of satisfaction with consumer electronics products.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
So your argument is that it's impossible for a device to be functional if it is also beautiful?
Why are the two things mutually exclusive?
That's sure a self-serving post that's been rating Informative.
Each time the iPhone has changed its hardware "it's been way ahead of any Android devices"?
You point to the resolution of the display and the better camera, and the gyroscope. Those are pretty arbitrary criteria.
I say 4G data connection and a bigger, MUCH more vibrant screen are way more important than the criteria you named, does that now make Android devices "way ahead of" the iPhone hardware?
Or are those not as important as the factors you named?
Heck, let's play the game your way, and just go back one year, to the iPhone 3GS. At that point, it had an inferior resolution display to what was available on Android, it had an inferior camera to the best available on android. So that would make Android devices "way ahead of" the iPhone 3GS when it came out right? Or were a different set of arbitrary characteristics the most important back then?
There are times when one piece of hardware is significantly better than another. Right now, neither the Android nor the iPhone camp is able to claim being the clear cut winner of hardware.
Apple devices, with their sleek aesthetics and sexy image, are appealing for reasons that have nothing to do with their functionality.
Sleek aesthetics and functionality are not mutually exclusive. Once everyone other than Apple figures that out, Apple might have some competition.
...because they are envied and admired. People feel good about owning stuff that other people wish they could own too.
Insecure people do that. And insecure people project about why they think people buy Apple products.
But I've seen the way iPaddies show off their new toy, and felt both envy and irritation with them
See, just like that.
One problem is that people have different definitions of "functional".
Lots of us here on /. consider something functional if we can Google around to find out how to edit the .rc file so we can run it from the command line. Most people don't consider anything that requires that functional - they want an easy-to-learn GUI that works out of the box, or immediately after a simple GUI-driven installation process.
Apple can make a computer-based system my mother can use. I'm positive she could learn to use an iPad. I'm equally positive she couldn't figure out how to do the same things on your netbook. Therefore, for Mom, an iPad would be far more functional than your netbook.
The main reason iPad owners like to show off is the neat things they can do with ease. The distinguishing thing about the iPad is functionality - the functionality Mom can use.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I admit I originally bought an iPad as little more than an expensive toy, figured I'd just have it sitting on the coffee table at home for casual surfing, email, etc.
But you know what? I'm finding it a wonderful device to have around the office. Being able to combine typing and freeform sketching on something with the same form factor as a pad of paper is great for taking notes, without "separating" you from other people by having a laptop screen in the way. iThoughts is fantastic for brainstorming and more structured note-taking. I can pull up a design flat, walk over to a designer, ask some questions, and scribble notes or sketch right on top of the design. Just as good as a full colour printer and a box of crayons. ;)
And where it really kills? Meetings. The other day someone asked a question about our new site's stats, so I pulled up a table of figures in Google Analytics and passed it around the meeting, just like a piece of paper. Try THAT with a laptop.
Can it replace a laptop or desktop for doing real work? Hell no. But I'm finding it invaluable for many things that have traditionally been the domain of paper & printouts. It's becoming my new "back of the napkin". When lying flat on a table it becomes far more of a shared, group experience than a laptop can ever be. No more huddling around one person's screen, everyone can see it, and even interact with it, at the same time.
Note that most of these points relate to the tablet form factor in general, not just the iPad.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson