Thursday, January 28, 2010

Further thoughts on the iPad

1) I felt momentarily bad when, after hearing the word "iPad" I immediately thought of feminine hygiene products. It turns out the entire Internet thought the same thing. Relief.

2) Jobs took a swing at netbooks in his speech yesterday, but seems to have not considered that the reason the market for a device between a laptop and a smartphone is so small is because the niche itself is so small. If I were in the market for a new laptop, I'd at least take a look at a netbook. If I were in the market for a new cell phone, I'd look at an iPhone or Droid. If I were looking at a tablet PC, I'd have to be looking for a tablet PC, and thus far I can't see why I'd prefer something as disabled as the iPad to a laptop.

3) I've been hearing about the death of the desktop OS for, oh, 15 years or so. I'm not yet 29. Draw your own conclusions.

4) Games are a nice value-add, but I'd bet not even a "casual gamer" is going to buy this for the games. They've already got Popcap and the Wii, for much less money.

5) I can't say how this will play with the general consumer, but Lord Almighty could Apple not have opted for simplicity, just once? The "dock" for something like this need not be anything more than a 4-port USB hub. But no, we've gotta have twee little connectors for everything.

2 comments:

Andre said...

Like you, I thought Scott Adams had a good take on this:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/ipad/

Andre said...

Wow, I'm basically incoherent at the end of the day. What I was trying to write was: I liked your take, Scott Adams had some good points too.