More Scary Robots

If you look at the geek complaints about the iPad, the obvious trend that emerges is that what the geeks really wanted from Apple was a generic $350 Mac netbook. But the more you think this through — the idea that Apple should have shipped a netbook rather than the iPad — the less sense it makes.

Netbooks work on the same paradigm as traditional desktop computers; they’re basically the desktop user experience, but slower, smaller, and cheaper.

If you’re not playing the meaningless “Apple vs. The World” game, and you’re looking at things purely in terms of Apple’s own unit sales (and profits), Apple’s approach is obviously better.

Let’s say instead of the iPad, Apple had introduced a $350 Mac netbook. As a Mac — firmly situated within the established desktop platform ecosystem — it would have been subject to the same forces that have stopped the Mac platform generally from breaking into the mainstream over the last decade. It wouldn’t have really offered unique advantages against Wintel netbooks, unless you were already interested in running OS X. Which also means it would have cannibalized Apple’s higher end Macs to some extent; people would buy it instead of a $999 MacBook. Finally, Apple probably would have had 10-15% profit margins on such a device (typical of the netbook market) instead of the 20-30% profit margins they’re probably running on the iPad (typical of iPod and iPhone).

With the iPad, Apple has a device that appeals to the existing Mac user base but won’t cause much cannibalization, and also has much more appeal outside of the existing Mac user base because it offers unique capabilities other than desktop OS X. So they’re likely to sell several times as many of them, with fewer losses to their higher end laptop sales. Oh, and they probably make 2-3x as much money from every one they sell, vs. a Mac netbook.

Looking past just the bottom line, the critical strategic issue is the whole “breaking into the mainstream” thing. With the iPhone, Apple has had its first real taste of mainstream success with a computing platform in a couple of decades, and they wanted more. And what they’ve realized is that the battle for the traditional desktop OS market has been over for a long time, and Microsoft won. So the way to get more is to launch another platform outside of that market. Except unlike the iPhone, the iPad platform has the capability to grow, over the years, into something that really could replace a traditional computer for many users.

See here.

This seems pretty unusual for Apple. There are only two plausible reasons why they might be doing this, I think. Either it has major new implications for developers, so they have to announce it well in advance of shipping, or it has major new features which they think will help sell iPads, so they want everyone to know it’s coming.

Either way, this event signals iPhone OS 4 is probably going to be a pretty big deal.

Excellent post by Matt Gemmell detaining everything Apple’s competitors need to understand about the iPad. Seriously, anyone trying to take on Apple, please listen to this guy, not the usual industry pundits:

It’s difficult to get our heads around the fact that these non-technologically-savvy users can suddenly constitute a core market for a device, yet that’s the case here. Nintendo saw it, and Apple sees it too. It’s an uncomfortable realisation since these people are so unfamiliar to people like you, as hardware manufacturers, and me as a software engineer. This discomfort leads to a kind of understandable blindness, and more importantly can make us leave money on the table. The relative sales and demand figures for Wii vs PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 over the last several Christmases are indicative of that.

When competing with iPad, you have to realise that, to your new core market, tablets are not computers. There’s no such thing (to your customer) as a “tablet computer”; the very name reduces the likelihood they’ll buy it. The potential of the tablet is that it’s not even seen as a computing device. This is an incredible opportunity to expand into a new market, if you’ll only commit to that mindset.

Read the whole thing. Of course I’m entirely certain that most — quite likely all — iPad competitors will make essentially every mistake Matt warns against. There are very few tech companies that have Apple’s understanding of what really matters to end-users. Maybe Nintendo should do a tablet.

Go here.

Particularly notable:

I can’t really make much of a pronouncement about these apps but I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements. And yet it’s remarkably uncluttered. All of the features of a “real” spreadsheet are there, but there are appear to be fewer buttons and controls here than what you’d find on a typical Android tip-calculator app.

And:

Fast. Fast, fast, fast. I did absurd things, like zoom in and out of webpages with fast twitches of my finger tips. The iPad kept right up with me, millisecond by millisecond. When you drag something, you feel like you’re physically sliding a photo across a surface; no need to wait for the OS to catch up with you. When you turn the iPad, the screen switches display modes almost instantly.

This sort of responsiveness enhances the whole experience. In so many touch-based systems — yes, I’m flashing an impatient glance at Android devices — the interaction feels like “I have made an input gesture; the ebook reader app has received the ‘turn to the next page’ command; the computer is now rendering and displaying an animation of a page turning in this ebook.” On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.

That’s the “magic” right there — put these factors together, and using the device feels like interacting with data with your fingers, rather than issuing commands though an abstract software interface.

Thinking this through (and reading quite a bit of the debate on both sides), I just realized where the criticism of the iPad takes us, if we follow it to its logical conclusion.

If Apple had just called up whatever Taiwanese outsourcing company makes the $350 Mini 10 netbook for Dell, and said “Give us a couple of million of those, but change the cases a little and put Apple logos on them,” and had slapped stock Snow Leopard installations on their hard drives, many iPad critics would have been substantially happier with the resulting product.

Think about this for a few minutes. Is this even a position worth arguing with? It’s so ludicrously wrong-headed it’s difficult to even imagine the depths of the obliviousness that could lead to such thinking.

If Apple ever releases a new product and the tech industry pundits all nod their heads and agree it’s just perfect, I’m selling my Apple stock. The day Apple can no longer confound the pundits is the day they’ve lost their edge.