Well by now everyone has written about the iPad and I’ve opted to wait and let my thoughts gel before saying my piece. I think the device itself is beautiful and much like the iPhone, it is a testament to refinement in consumer electronics design and manufacturing. Apple consistently designs its products with a strong concept in mind and while all design involves compromise, Apple manages to carry through all the meaningful core elements that make its products great and not just good or mediocre like its competitors. Apple pays strong homage to form in design as well, resulting in products with forms that become iconic rather than just cases for the necessary hardware.
Undisputed beauty aside, let’s talk about the beast. In all corporate business, there is the need to survive, the need to increase profits, and the need to grow. These ‘needs’ are often responsible for forces that work against all the good things mentioned above. Apple manages time and time again to produce an amazing product that has not had it’s heart and soul pared away by an over-optimized manufacturing process.
However, the beast must be fed. How does Apple escape the process that makes the average Sony Ericsson phone look like an artifact from an eighties era sci-fi flick? They suck the money out of you instead of the design and manufacturing process. Witness the iPod iTunes connection. Sure iPods could be made more cheaply, and less chicly, but being the fashionable toy of choice has infinite dividends when if its connected to entertainment media sales.
Apple has added a layer to its product business model that involves you buying virtual/digital products with or for its devices after you make the original purchase. It’s no longer about just making a great personal computer for Apple. That not-so-cheap but chic design I mentioned earlier has allowed them to raise that original purchase price tag consistently well above their competitors as well. Nice touch Apple.
A CD player manufacturer in the nineties enjoyed no such direct connection to the additional revenue stream Apple enjoys with the iPod and iTunes store. Never has the power of this relationship been better demonstrated than just days ago as Apple crossed the ten billion threshold of songs downloaded from iTunes. This powerful formula has been repeated with the iPhone and the App Store on iTunes, and now again in its strongest formulation yet in the iPad.
What can only be characterized as a brilliant and amazing marketing scheme is now what drives design at Apple. This explains the sudden movement towards closed devices from Apple. The iPhone and iPad, while in essence simply small computers, are purposely limited to act more like devices. Apple will say it must exert this level of control over the operating system and all other programs running on the devices to maintain proper core functionality. An improperly created application can hog precious memory and cpu time to the point of preventing the phone functions from working properly.
While all that is certainly true, it was not that long ago that a crappy or buggy application could crash your desktop computer as well. Who saved us from such disasters then? However did we get our computers working again so we could access core functions
again and read our email and other basic tasks? Well we rebooted and either removed or re-installed the app that just behaved badly and got on with our day. WE did it. OURSELVES. Thanks Apple but I don’t need you to hold my hand as I play with my big scary computer device.
I’m thinking if I just installed a new gaming app I just found on the internet on my open system iPhone/iPad and the system barely worked after that and I was unable to make calls, I’d ditch the offending app and leave an unfavourable comment on the download site warning others of the problem. Well behaved apps would quickly gain a favourable reputation and badly behaved apps a negative one, much like sellers to on eBay.
Since the ‘saving us from the big bad killer apps’ excuse holds little water, why does Apple really insist on closing the iPhone/iPad operating system? To support its brilliant iPod/iTunes formula of course. If apps could be downloaded and purchased from anywhere on the web, Apple would lose its apps sales cash cow on the iTunes store.
The iPad is simply the latest flashy progeny of Apple’s brilliant ‘buy our device, and buy our crap forever after’ mother formula. This time they’ve added even more revenue streams. Unlike the iPhone, with the iPad you can realistically rent or buy a movie from iTunes and watch it comfortably on a decent sized screen. The same is now true for e-books and other reading materials. Apple, coveting Amazon’s success with the Kindle, is hoping for a chunk of electronic book and magazine sales through yet another device dependent store: iBookstore.
Every company has to make money, and every product is designed to make a profit. So why does this beautiful new device give you an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach? Maybe it’s because you know you’re being manipulated in grand style to pull your hard earned dollars out of your pocket and give them to Apple and keep giving them to Apple into infinity. What’s wrong with that you say? I’ll buy books regardless of how I read them. Well consider if all the printed books in the world were only sold by one store. Do you think the prices would be competitive? Competitive with who? Would you feel like you could shop around and find a bargin? These things would be impossible because one of the driving forces of our economy, competition, would be essentially muscled out of the equation.
Until I seen an open operating system that allows me to install whatever applications I want on my iPad (and break its functionality if I see fit to do so, it is mine to play with after all), load whatever eBooks I want, regardless of where I’ve purchased them, and watch whatever movies formats I wish, regardless of where I’ve purchased them, I’m going to have to assume I’m being manipulated into buying stuff for what are essentially fixed prices in what is essentially a closed market place.
The iPad is a sparkling and beautiful device, perfect for distracting you while their hand is in your pocket.
