Steve Jobs doesn’t follow a presentation template but as outlined in my new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, he does consistently follow the same principles that have turned Apple product launches into an art form. The iPad announcement on Wednesday, January 27th was no exception: classic Steve Jobs.
The formidable Economist magazine has blessed Steve Jobs with a rare cover story examining the potential impact of the Jesus tablet.
Even rarer, the iPad story is mostly positive, even if the religious imagery is over the top.
The Economist fancies Jobs’ chances of shaking up not just one industry, but three — especially media:
Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.
Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.
Read more: Tablet computing — The book of Jobs.
Via 9to5Mac. Thanks Seth.
Although that $499 entry-level iPad is pretty much affordably by everyone, Apple will still be making a rather sizable profit on each one, if a bill-of-materials (BOM) breakdown conducted by BroadPoint AmTech analyst Marshall is to be trusted.
According to the BOM, the low-end $499 iPad only costs $270 to make, with the 9.7-inch touch-sensitive display being the most expensive element at around $100, with the 16GB SSD and aluminum case each costing only about $25.
As the storage jumps, so do Apple’s profits: the 32GB and 64GB iPads only see their costs rise another $25.50 and $76.50, respectively, but their suggested prices go up $100 and $200.
Apple’s most profitable BOM item? The 3G radio: it only costs them $16, but Apple’s charging over $130 for it. I personally wonder if some of that mark-up might be shared with AT&T to compensate them for assumed profit losses related to the month-by-month, cancel-anytime iPad 3G deal, but either way, Apple’s charging a premium for the functionality.
It’s all an estimate, of course — no one will know the iPad’s true cost until it’s actually vivisected after launch — but Apple knows how to put together a high-quality product that is both extremely profitable and an extremely good value. I wouldn’t be surprised if these numbers were exactly right.
There’s little to fault the Apple iPad for, at least as far as the price is concerned. The entry level $499 price is low enough that even those with their reservations about the iPad can pretty much afford to pick one up.
Or can they? According to an analysis by CBS MoneyWatch, the true cost of an iPad over four years is much higher than Apple is claiming.
Sharp-eyed observers have noticed what looks to be an iSight camera in the iPad Steve Jobs used in last week’s keynote.
Even though Jobs didn’t talk about a camera, and it’s not mentioned in Apple’s official tech specs, something that looks like an iSight camera can be seen when Jobs first holds the iPad up for everyone to see.
As he holds it up, the light catches the iPad’s surface, illuminating something underneath. That something looks like an iSight camera, similar to the ones built into MacBooks, under the screens.
In the official iPad podcast, it can be seen around the 1:23:40 mark.
It’s not conclusive, of course, but corroborates the prototype images published by Engadget in the run up to the event, which clearly show an iSight camera in the same position. And references to a camera have been found in both the iPad’s Address Book software and the iPad firmware.
The absence of a camera on the iPad has been one of the device’s most puzzling omissions. Although, as our own John Brownlee first noted, a camera in a tablet that’s sitting in your lap, staring up at you, doesn’t produce the most flattering camera angles.
UPDATE: A repair company called Mission Repair says the iPad’s frame clearly shows an empty spot for an iSight camera, and it is exactly the same size and shape as the iSight slot in a MacBook’s screen frame. (Mission Repair received a shipment of iPad parts on Monday, the company blog says).
Thanks NyxoLyno.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA
Here is Steve Jobs’ iPad keynote in less than 180 seconds. It’s wonderful! Amazing! Incredible!
The video sums up “all the important words,” says its creator, Neil Curtis.
“I assure you that no scene is repeated and everything was said on this keynote!” he adds. “Oh, and please don’t take it personal: it’s meant to be humor!”
Engadget has confirmed the reports of “extremely trusted sources” that the iPad’s iPhone OS 3.2 contains support for a host of long anticipated features, including video calling, file downloads and even SMS messaging.
According to their sources, the current beta of iPhone OS 3.2 includes hooks to accept and decline video conferencing, as well as flip a video-feed (for a front-mounted camera) and run the video call in either full screen mode or in a small window.
More than that, iPhone OS 3.2 currently hints at file downloads and local storage in the browser, which means you can finally slurp down a link to, say, an MP3 or eBook and use it in iTunes or iBooks. It also has hooks for iPad-specific SMS messaging.
This is preliminary code, and none of this functionality works right now, but at the very least, it implies some future developments in both the iPad and iPhone. It’s the video conferencing stuff that’s really interesting though: the iPad contains no camera, so either Apple’s already programming video conferencing support for the iPad 2G, the next iPhone is finally going to get a secondary forward mounted camera… or both.
Of all the criticism being leveled at the iPad — no multitasking, poor text input, lack of 23rd century Federation replicator technology — I’ve yet to hear anyone complain about the attractive $499 entry-level price. But just in case you aren’t convinced that the iPad is ridiculously, absurdly cheap for its feature set, behold, the inevitable infographic, put together by Darren Beckett.
There’s criticisms to be leveled at the Infographic — it ignores, for example, comparisons to various Android and Intel Atom based tablets in favor of attacking e-readers — but it still gets the point across: the iPad beats the competition, spec for spec, at the cost of a very slight price premium. In fact, in direct comparison, only the Barnes & Noble Nook seems to be appropriately priced in comparison.
For what it does, the iPad is simply the cheapest tablet out there. Don’t expect a mere infographic to finally put to rest the inexorably critical mutterings of the so-called “Apple Tax,” though.
A lot of commentators on the iPad noticed the similarity between Delicious Library and the iBooks virtual bookshelves for the display of e-book titles. So did Delicious Monsters Wil Shipley.
Talking to the Washington Post, Shipley seemed upset… but also seemed to understand.
But the thing about iBooks is, it’s a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library’s shelves), and said: yup, this is what we’re doing…
Shipley then notes that he actually understands why Apple couldn’t write him a check: it would have been taken as a legal admission that Apple copied his design, and since Delicious Library’s UI isn’t copyrighted or patented, it actually would open up culpability, not close it.
As inevitable as the dawn follows the night, a LEGO simulacrum will follow the announcement of the latest Apple product announcement. Here, then, in dimpled, rainbow colored blocks, the necessary LEGO iPad, courtesy of Flickr user Brickjournal and his plastic brick ingenuity.
Although it’s hardly as killer a feature as carrier unlock, one of the main reasons I still jailbreak my iPhone is so I can cram five icons into the dock… so when the iPad was first demonstrated, and showed only four available icons in the dock, I actually winced.
No need to fear, though, because this time, Apple has us all covered: a reader wrote into TUAW and pointed out that the iPad SDK allows up to six icons in the dock.
You might assume the iPad supports this behavior because of the larger screen, but the iPhone crams five icons into the dock just fine. I’ve always assumed, in fact, that the iPhone only allows four icons so that each dock’s icons is symmetrical with the columns of icons above.
I wonder two things: will the iPad, then, allow up to six icons per row, to make everything symmetrical with the dock? Finally, will the next iPhone update expand the dock similarly? Fingers crossed on both accounts.
You can tell Jay-Z is disappointed he doesn’t have one. And then he remembers he has his own brand of vodka and millions of dollars.
Via Engadget
Though the announcement of Apple’s iPad has met with the typical mixture of hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic criticism (no one can talk sensibly about it), there has been one consistent complaint that most would agree is valid: a device this powerful should be capable of some form of multitasking. But I think I have the answer.
Here are two interesting but conflicting opinions on the iPad, pro and con.
Con: Tech author Rafe Colburn says the iPad is a scary harbringer of the closed future of consumer computing.
“General purpose computing is too complicated for most people anyway, and the iPad’s descendants along with similar competing products from other companies will offer an enticing alternative. So I see the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely occurrence.”
Pro: But Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt is extremely positively about the iPad’s closed system. To his mind it’s a major asset:
“The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.”
I’m with Hewitt. The IPad is a cloud computer par excellence, and we will likely be able to run almost any software we want on it, but it’ll be on a server somewhere and not on the iPad. Colburn notes this too, but thinks it’s a bad thing.
Why is there no Adobe Flash on the iPad? Adobe says it’s not because it’s buggy, as an Apple source claimed this afternoon to CultofMac.com.
It’s because Apple is protecting revenue streams derived from content like movies and games. If users could watch free TV shows on Hulu, they wouldn’t buy them through iTunes.
“It’s pretty clear if you connect the dots: the issue is about revenue,” says Adrian Ludwig, an Adobe group product manager for Flash, during a telephone interview on Friday afternoon.
Well, that didn’t take long — app developers have already begun rolling out versions of their apps that’ll expand the capabilities of the iPad, still a good two months away from store shelves. One of the first is ActivePrint, from developer Pocket Watch.
Currently, ActivePrint lets iPhone users pop out things like photos, web pages, plain text and clipboard contents. But Pocket Watch says the new iPad SDK will allow printing of office-type stuff — like word processing docs, spreadsheets and presentations — to any WIndows PC.
…wait, what? You heard right — currently, ActivePrint only outputs to printers connected to a Windows machine. But not for long, the developer says: Mac compatibility should be out in March.
Just in time for your new iPad.
UPDATE: Adobe says Flash is not buggy and that Apple is protecting revenue streams from content like movies and games.
Flash will not be coming to the iPad — not now, not ever — says a source inside Apple who is part of the iPad development team.
Instead, Apple will rely on HTML 5 and CSS to play rich media, such as YouTube videos, on the web.
“Flash is too buggy and will crash the whole device,” says the Apple source. “Apple’s done no deal with Adobe.”
Adobe is so bothered by Apple excluding Flash from the iPad, it put porn up on its blog to prove the point.
Abobe’s official Flash Blog has a post entitled “The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?” which shows how several popular websites would look without Flash content. Right at the top is a screenshot of Bang Bros HD, a hardcore porn site.
As you can see, an iPad without Flash is going to be pretty much useless for HD porn.
“Millions of websites use Flash,” the blog post says. “Get used to the blue Legos.”
UPDATE: We checked, and there’s an MP4-based version of Bang Bros, which works fine on the iPad as is. So even Adobe’s most desperate tactic isn’t true.
Following up yesterday’s revelation that the iPad SDK contains photo capturing ability, despite the lack of onboard camera, comes this juicy little screenshot, showing the iPad displaying an iPhone-esque “Touch to return a call” bar across the top of the screen.
Since there’s no chance the iPad is going to operate as an enormous mobile phone (I wonder who the exclusive carrier of the iPad in Brobdingnag would even be?) I think this pretty much confirms what I guessed: the iPad SDK has some residual iPhone features still loitering shiftlessly about, and everything will probably be polished up before the iPad’s release. About your business then.
[via Engadget]
See that New York Times article displayed on the iPad in the official Apple demo image to the right?
It’s called 31 Places to Go in 2010: you should click on it and check it out. When you’re done, come back and tell me what’s wrong with the iPad demo image.
Yup. Exactly so. The iPad doesn’t do Flash, but yet the New York Times’ piece contains a slideshow powered by Adobe’s plugin.
This doesn’t mean the iPad secretly runs Flash: Apple’s clearly trying to move the web away from it as a standard plugin, not just because it threatens the App Store but, as Apple themselves noted on Wednesday, the Flash plugin was responsible for more crashes reported to Apple across all of OS X than any other source.
It looks like Apple just fudged the truth a little in their iPad promo images. That’s worth a scolding cluck or two, but there’s no doubt in my mind that sites like the New York Times are already hard at work making sure all of their content works on the iPad without Flash. Not so much a fib, then, as a look at the future.
[via Apple Insider]
Before you can even get your hands on one, Northern Film & Media is offering £40,000 (about $64,500) for iPad application ideas from developers in England’s North East.
Dev teams — which can include some members from out of the area — have until February 24 to come up with revenue-generating ideas that don’t duplicate the device’s standard app functions, aren’t kissing cousins of iPhone apps and are launchable by summer, 2010.
They’re putting up the cash in the hopes that locals will make a mark on the iPad:
“The iPod changed the way we thought about music. The iPhone transformed our attitudes to mobile phones, and opened our minds to all the things they could do other than call people” Tom Harvey, Chief Executive of Northern Film & Media said in the presser. “What does the iPad transform? You decide. Newspaper and magazine reading? Gaming? Writing and painting?”
The location requirement is fairly strict but may be skirtable: the app must “be developed by teams where at least 70% of the team’s talent have their base in and 50% of the budget is spent in the North East.”
Complete info and application download here.
The iBooks service/feature for iPad is conspicuous in its absence from Apple iPad web pages outside of the USA, and the American site’s rather ominous “iBooks is available only in the U.S.” footnote made people ask whether Apple was going to fumble the ball. PC Pro today got confirmation from an Apple spokesperson about the subject from a British perspective, the statement being: “iBooks will be available in the UK, but the timing of that will not be announced until the iPad goes on sale”. In other words, pretty much as John Brownlee guessed here, yesterday.
Here’s hoping the timescale is ‘very soon’, rather than it taking as long to get British iBooks (and those for other non-US territories) as it did movies and other non-music media in iTunes. Here’s also hoping that PC Pro gives its headline writer a slap—titling an article ‘Book service in doubt for UK iPad’ when the Apple spokesperson confirmed the feature will be in no doubt is, to say the least, inaccurate link-bait tosh.
Guest commentary by David Barnard, owner of App Cubby, publisher of the popular Gas Cubby and Trip Cubby apps.
Much has been written about all the iPad surprises, disappointments, features, missing features, hype, expectations, future, etc. adnauseam. But not much has been written about what the iPad says about Apple. I’m excited about the iPad because of the many ways it demonstrates that Apple just gets it.
Palm almost gets it, Microsoft may be on it’s way to getting it with the Zune platform, Blackberry doesn’t have to get it, and Google just doesn’t get it.
What’s this “it” I’m referring to? Humans.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCHzgRPXRCM&feature=player_embedded
There’s some pretty good jokes is this Barely Political mash-up of President Obama’s State of the Union address and Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation.
Enough of my dumb opinions. I thought it would be interesting to find out what some Mac and iPhone developers make of the iPad. What are their first impressions? What do they intend to make for the iPad platform? Do they have any concerns?
I got in touch with a whole bunch of developer contacts and asked them if they’d like to share their thoughts with you, the Cult readers.
Here are the replies I got.
Ken Case of OmniGroup revealed that the company is working on iPad versions of apps like OmniFocus and OmniGraffle:
“We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and are looking forward to updating OmniFocus to take advantage of the larger screen size. We’re also looking at creating iPad adaptations of several of our other productivity apps, such as OmniGraffle.”
Manton Reece of Riverfold Software (maker of Clipstart and Wii Transfer):
“I was so annoyed with the closed nature of the App Store that I stopped developing for the iPhone. The iPad will still have those frustrations, but the large screen opens up a whole new class of applications. It’s impossible to resist.”
Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems (maker of Tinderbox):
“The iPad announcement leaves many things unclear. Does iWork depend on private APIs, or will developers be able to write first-class applications? Will individual books be subject the the approval process — leaving 40 overworked Apple employees the additional task of approving or rejecting books an magazines?
“Since 1982, Eastgate’s been publishing original hypertext fiction and nonfiction. These works — many of which are now studied in universities throughout the world — can’t be printed and can’t be simulated in ePub. But, if we bring them to iPad, would that be vetoed as duplicating the built-in book functionality?
“In short, the app store is a source of grave concern for software developers. That said, the iPad is the most exciting personal computing development for a decade. It will transform our notion of computing and redefine the idea of the information appliance.”
