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Figuring Out the iPad's Place
An anonymous reader writes "One of the most interesting notes from Apple's recent quarterly report was that iPad sales are down. Pundits were quick to jump on that as evidence that the iPad was just a fad, but there were still more than 16 million units sold. iPads, and the tablet market as a whole, clearly aren't a fad, but it's also unclear where they're going. They're not convincingly replacing PCs on one end or phones on the other. Meanwhile, PCs and phones are both morphing into things that are more like tablets. New form factors often succeed (or fail) based on what they can do better than old form factors, and the iPad hasn't done enough to make itself distinct, yet. Ben Thompson had an insightful take on people demanding desktop functionality from the iPad: 'This sounds suspiciously like the recommendation that the only thing holding the Macintosh back was its inability to run Apple II programs. It's also of a piece with the vast majority of geek commentary on the iPad: multiple windows, access to the file system, so on and so forth. I also think it's misplaced. The future of the iPad is not to be a better Mac. That may happen by accident, just as the Mac eventually superseded the Apple II, but to pursue that explicitly would be to sacrifice what the iPad might become, and, more importantly, what it already is.'"
Perhaps sales are slowing down because of market saturation. The iPad was the first of its kind (that people actually bought, used, and liked). Almost everyone who wants one has probably bought one and the slowing rate reflects market saturation. A diminishing pool of new buyers and a steady pool of people replacing older models would help to explain the "dwindling" sales.
I would like it if different pass codes unlocked to different layouts. This way I can have a more restricted layout and app for my son.
But then you wouldn't need to have one for you *and* one for him. Those Apple folks need to buy new yachts, my friend. What are you trying to do, kill the global economy? Geez Louise!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
The thing is, Apple doesn't sell 'product'. They sell 'experience'. How well does it work? How well does it *stay* working, over the long term?
I used to have a iphone and I had the same complaints as you. Upgrading was too expensive. Not expandable. Not enough control over the device.
So my next device was a Samsung Galaxy S3. This phone has to be the single biggest piece of shit I have ever purchased. Unstable. Burned through battery, to the point where after having owned it for only 3 months, I was getting less than half a day charge out of the thing. Sure, I got the control and upgradability I wanted, but I was forced to sacrifice stability and reliability and security.
These devices are only cheaper when you don't feel that your personal time is worth any money.
I bought a couple of landfill android tablets just so I could have something to read documentation with. Basically, my entire use case was to be an e-reader. The quality of the tablets was so bad that I couldn't even do that well. A battery life of a few hours at most. While in standby.
So now I have an iPad. It's by far the best mobile device I've owned. No, I can't plug in SD cards and expand the storage. Yes, it was expensive. But let me ask you this... how much is it worth to you to know that you can pull out an iPad out of it's sleeve and be guaranteed that it's going to still have battery life. That the screen will turn out, without fail, when you hit the power button?
Apple products are not flawless. They have problems too. There is not a single thing produced by man that doesn't have problems now and then. My iPad has crashed now and then under mysterious circumstances (rarely happens now, after the latest update...) but when you compare that to the experiences I've had with the alternatives, I'll take another Apple product hands down, because I have a life to lead and I have no interest spending my time trying to figure out why something I paid good money for doesn't want to work.