Will Apple's iPad be Steve Jobs' Newton?
Anyone remember the failure of the much-ridiculed Apple Newton?
No one would propose Jobs' job is in jeopardy, but I'm beginning to get a queasy feeling about the prospects for Apple's new iPad.
I've long been an enthusiastic if frustrated proponent of tablet computers. My Kindle provide a feeble look at what they can be. And I'm confident Apple will eventually have a good, tablet. But today's iPad? Not even close.
Jobs' positioned the iPad as suited for consuming content not creating it. Yet the iPad can't present Adobe's Flash, which comprises somewhere around 70-80 percent of the video on the Internet.
Jobs' says the iPad will support an open standard for digital books, yet it will use proprietary DRM that will keep the books from being readable anywhere else.
You won't be able to watch video from Hulu.com, the leading TV Web site on the iPad, or baseball on MLB.com, or news on CNN.com or movies from Netflix.com, or any of the video's on the New York Times web site (which was embarrassingly demonstrated in Job's keynote with a nice, empty box where the video was supposed to be).
If you want to preview the experience of using an Apple iPad, simply turn off Flash in your browser for a day; then ask yourself if you'd pay $500-to-$900 more for that experience.
Jobs' explanation is that he's doing this for your own good because Flash is bad for you and for your computer and it will be replaced with HTML 5, anyway.
If you believe all the millions of videos on the Internet will be taken down and redone with HTML 5, I've got some Lehman Brothers' shares to sell you.
Caption: You can see what reading the NYT's Web site will be like on the iPad from this amusing faux pas, during the iPad launch demo. Image from Engadget via 9to5Mac. Cartoon panel is from Doonesbury, click it to go to the full strip.
So, this means that until the entire Internet is upgraded, the iPad will basically be a viewer for Apple's iTunes Web site.
Now, iTunes is a wonderful storefront. Absolutely wonderful. But will you pay $500-to-$900 to have a thinner device than your laptop to use in buying iTunes media?
That value proposition seems thinner than the iPad.
The other reason I fear for the iPad's success is that the Apple hype machine, never shy, is straining to lavish new levels of hyperbole upon it's latest spawn. An Apple executive describes the device with a flowery version of Arthur C. Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Their marketing is an inadvertent parody of what HP said about it's ill-fated touch-screen computer back, what was that 30 years ago?
Problem is, there is little ground-breaking about the iPad: The LCD screen is good, but not extraordinary; the iPad certainly could have been much thinner, a strength compromised no doubt by cost; the processor is slower than that in many mobile phones; connectivity is quite limited -- no USB, no Firewire, no video out, Bluetooth might be crippled ... and so on.
So, resorting to "magic" makes Apple's execs seem desperate.
Also, Apple's sales of the iPad will be quite public and if they slow significantly after the initial rush of Apple Fanboys that will buy anything Jobs anoints, that could create a negative spiral. Optimists draw analogies between the iPad and Amazon's Kindle, which is viewed as a success.
But Amazon's Jeff Bezos has been able to play a clever game with the media. Bezos tells the MSM that sales of Amazon's Kindle are at record levels and they regurgitate every Amazon press release -- without once asking if sales as so good, why won't Amazon give us any numbers? I guarantee you that if the Kindle's sales really were so extraordinary, Bezos would be releasing the numbers daily.
So, Amazon is able to get a few hundred thousand people to pay $300 or so for a proprietary reader for its eBooks, and get good PR out of that.
But if Apple sells a couple of million iPads, that will be viewed as a maxi failure.
Finally, I should want to buy one, but I don't. I have two Macbook Pro's with Cinema displays, an iPod Touch, heck I even own an Apple TV -- and I have a Kindle. If Apple can't make me envious enough to drop $500, it's going to have a tough time with more pragmatic people.
But then one can't under-estimate the enthusiasm of Apple Fanboys.
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