Great article with a unique viewpoint. Tech blogs, geeks like us and pundits are obsessing over RAM and minute details of the spec sheet while consumers will be playing with the new software, trying on Smart Covers and imagining an iPad 2 as a fashion accessory.
His 3rd point, regarding color, is to me one of the most compelling reasons Apple maintains such a large market share of portable products over time. No one likes to own the exact same thing everyone else has and so by using color to differentiate, consumers can still feel unique when purchasing mass-produced items.
Has any other company used color in such a way? (the only example that comes to my mind is the original Pokemon games)
> Has any other company used color in such a way? (the only example that comes to my mind is the original Pokemon games)
Nintendo seems to, I have seen their DS units in a lot of colors. Related to Apple and the iPod, SanDisk offers the Sansa in a range of colors. It can be a challenge though, as Apple showed with the mythical white iPhone 4.
The article mentions Kodak in 1927, which is an important year for color in the design of products. 1927 was the year that Catalin plastic was introduced. It was like Bakelite without the sawdust filler, so it could be produced in colors other than black and brown, and could be left translucent or marbled, as well.
This was used to great effect all over the place, but the staggering variety of beautiful radio sets of the 30s to 50s are a particularly good example.
If you look at buying a non-used car, you might get a wide choice of colours in the brochure, but in all honestly, how many garages will sell you the exact colour you want (with the spec you want) there & then? People I know who have tried this, generally wait around two weeks or more from order to delivery, or settle for a slightly different spec.
I don't see how you can easily scale consumer electronics manufacturing to allow for a range of different colours (certainly not in the case of the iPad anyway), one key factor being that I don't think you can predict demand of individual colours reliably enough.
Then you have the issue of handling returns etc. People would get annoyed walking into an Apple store to swap a broken device, only to be told they've run out of that colour/spec combination. They can probably get away with it on the nano due to small product size, low manufacturing cost and limited spec difference (2 base models). If they made the iPad in five colours, you've suddenly upped the variation from 6 models to 30. That's a big leap and a big complication to many otherwise simpler business processes.
My TV comes in one colour, my toaster two, my SLR one, my printer one, heck even mass market clothing/fashion items rarely come in more than a couple of base colours these days. The majority of consumers are not bothered by purchasing something in a generic colour if the product is good enough, companies want to sell to this majority (not the minority of people that refuse to purchase something based on colour) to maximize profit.
OK, so you can't get the same ADSL router in a choice of colours that I know of, or the same book with a choice of covers, but choice of colours in stuff is not innovation.
Dell has offered a range of colours on their notebooks for at least a few years. It's rare but not unheard of. Also the Panasonic Shockwave walkmans and discmans of the 90s. There are 2 off the top of my head.
Within consumer electronics, Nokia were good at letting customers differentiate their phones by allowing interchangeable facias. Didn't Sony also release various colours of Walkmen?
I imagine the ability to mass produce a product in multiple colours was made vastly easier with the introduction plastics.
So I could see Tupperware being a contender for one of the first?
There you go, you're no longer thinking about whether an iPad is right for you, you're thinking whether a Black iPad with brown cover is more right than a White iPad with Red leather.
"I'd like to schedule a meeting with you, is Wednesday afternoon, or Friday morning better for you?"
Compared to Apple, all the other computer companies look socially inept. It's like the difference between someone who actually understands how people work, and a bunch of Mr. Nerd McDorky.
Absolutely spot on! Around the time the iPad1 launched, I told one of my close friends "imagine GarageBand on this!" and it is absolutely thrilling to see such a lovely implementation come to the iPad2. Using the accelerometer to detect the force with which you hit the piano keys is really clever!
I just watched the video from the event, and as someone who likes to record music once in a while, Garageband looks completely amazing. As it is, most of the time when I have spare time to spend on making songs I'm not around all the equipment that I need to do that. If it holds up to the promise of the video, it looks like I can go on vacation and just bring the ipad and a guitar, and I can record full song ideas with basic drumming, chords and singing parts, arrange different parts etc.
This looks like it'll be huge for song writers, really. Sure, an acoustic guitar and a simple four-track recorder does the same basic thing, but this is like a mini pro tools. Can't wait to play with it.
I agree it looks stellar. But as a developer of songwriting applications ( I believe the "Smart Instruments" are a basic implementation of our ideas ) my heart dropped when I saw the price. $4.99 for this amount of content is amazing, but also impossible for smaller devs to compete with head on.
With that in mind I hope shortly after release Apple publishes some sort of easy way to export directly to Garage Band so that more niche products can ride the coat tails.
Speaking of Apple polish, why is the cover choice between "leather" (luxury car seats, fashionable gloves, sexy clothing) and "polyurethane" (chemical plant, medical inspection, man made, dystopia).
Why haven't they given it a pleasing, desirable, luxury name?
People who want a COLOURFUL!!! case don't really care what the material is called. It's colourful! People who want the leather case care very much that it is leather.
Similarly people buying the white Macbook don't care what 'polycarbonate' means, but to the Macbook Pro buyer, 'precision aluminium unibody', 'edge-to-edge glass' and previously 'titanium' are/were selling points.
No offense intended, but my first impression on the headline was that it was probably announcing that Steve Jobs health concerns are concerns no more, after he presided over the launch. That to me is a big announcement considering that a lot of investors and apple product loyalists have a sense of urgency when it comes the apple chief's health.
>"One measure of the suite's success is journalism school."
Journalism and other departments within US universities push Apple products because of the high profits those schools earn on Macs and iPods sold through on campus bookstores to incoming freshman using their student (and parental) loans.
Not sure why the gp got down voted, I think his point is valid, albeit wrong. Student bookstores sell computers, hardware and software at a student discount - my uni sold macbooks at a $100 discount from retail price. This stuff is sold (or sometimes even given away) for the purpose of locking students into a platform.
For example, my uni gave away ms software, like visual studio, to try to encourage adoption, train the students to use ms tools (so when they graduate, they are more likely to find a job using ms tools), and to thereby lock us into their platform. It used to be Sun, then MS. Apple is now doing it, and whoever comes after Apple will do it...
I think pretty much every company on the planet has student discounts. It’s nothing special, it’s nothing specific about Apple. (And it makes, economically speaking, a lot of sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)
For on campus bookstores, computer sales to students correlate to x computers per student not y dollars of total sales. Thus even after discounts, the higher price of Apple products means a greater revenue for the bookstore than Windows or Linux based machines (and greater net earnings assuming constant margins).
The amount a student is able to borrow depends on the costs calculated by the University. Therefore, the higher cost of Macs can be built in to the student's loan package - with the university receiving a portion of that additional money back with fewer restrictions on how it is spent (unlike tuition and fees). That is particularly attractive to public universities.
In smaller college towns, the University may be the only bookstore which sells Macs due to the difficulty an independent bookstore has in qualifying as a Mac dealer as Apple has shifted its retail strategy over the past few years. This again gives the university a financial incentive to require Macs and other Apple products.
