Check Mate: Apple's iPad and Google's Next Move

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/the-chess-grandmaster-apples-i.html

by stakent • 16 years ago

47 26 16 years ago

radar.oreilly.com

jakez• 16 years ago

"it is a product that is deeply personal to Steve Jobs, and I believe the final signature product on an amazing career."

Kind of touching in an odd way. I will miss Steve Jobs when he retires from Apple.

CalmQuiet• 16 years ago

As someone of Jobs' age I would be most pleased to discover that there are still some human/silicon interfaces waiting to be dramatically polished to someone's sense of perfection.

When someone else amasses both the will and the capital to achieve what Steve has then more power to 'em.

ajross• 16 years ago

FTA: Thus, a reasoned analysis is that the iPad is to the iPhone & iPod Touch as the MacBook Air is to the MacBook. In other words, a cool product with a devoted base of happy customers, but in relative terms, a niche product in Apple's arsenal of rainmakers.

The difference being, of course, that the Air is a high-margin luxury item and was always intended to be so. Apple never intended to sell them by the millions, and is no doubt happy with the revenue generated. The iPad is priced just a tiny bit higher than a netbook, and looks to have a rather larger part cost (LED screen, large touch surface instead of a cheap keyboard, scary amounts of flash, custom chipset instead of mass-market Intel stuff).

There's no room there for "niche" products. If that's all they get, the product will be stillborn.

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

A good article, but I think it misses one important point: the eventual commoditization of devices like this. Apple's entire touch screen platform does look compelling for non-techs, but there will be a raft of very inexpensive similar devices hitting the market, and I still think that lower cost will win the most market share (eventually).

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

At that point, just release an iPad app into the wild like they've done with iTunes and Safari. You'll still have iTunes and the App Store, and they'll still be able to dominate the high-end high-margin part of the market.

Actually, they'd probably wind up selling more of their kit by doing this!

goatforce5• 16 years ago

In the same way the iPod range has been crushed by generic MP3 players?

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

Interesting, but the MP3 player market seems to be somewhat of a fluke in terms of resisting commoditization. Perhaps it's due to the iTunes marketplace keeping Apple's product line superior, in which case the iPad + App Store combo could end up doing the same. Then again, the iPhone doesn't have the market share that the iPod does, and I think iPhone market share will peak and then drop as Android and other mobile handsets come online that are truly competitive.

On the other hand, businesses generally buy PCs because they're far cheaper, but the market for MP3 players in a business context is basically non-existent, whereas it's potentially huge for the tablet market, so that's another mark against Apple.

It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.

alex_stoddard• 16 years ago

But market share does not equate with revenue.

As highlighted in the iPad launch, Apple introduced the modern laptop with the first ever PowerBook. The laptop market is now definitely commoditized but that doesn't stop Apple from making a lot of money selling fewer highly profitable laptops.

They have something under 10% of the total laptop market but 90% or more of the segment > $1,000 per computer.

pchristensen• 16 years ago

I wrote about this at my blog (http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/a-closed-apple-pla...) but here's a quick recap.

Since technology advances faster than consumer demand, the differentiating factor for purchases changes over time. First it's possibility, then power/flexibility, then price, then convenience/usability. iPods and mp3 players got cheap enough that the usability of th iPod/iTunes Music Store became the deciding factor and there was no demand for undercutting it on price.

Also, the music use case is so well defined that there wasn't much room to compete on flexibility. PCs have miles and miles of flexibility, but by defining the role of the iPad as music, movies, books, and games (basically media consumption), it might be staking out a territory where it can outperform everyone rather than compete with commodity devices.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

Similarly, while iPad lays clear Apple's ambition to pursue the e-book market aggressively (they demonstrated a nice iBooks player and added an iBook Store to complement the iTunes and App Store marketplaces), they demonstrated virtually nothing that harnesses the touch, tilt, rich media and programmatic elements that they can bring to the re-invention of print media.

I'm looking forward to downloading and running the Kindle iPhone program from the App Store.

dgabriel• 16 years ago

I have the kindle app, and it's not anywhere near as much fun to use as my actual Kindle. It's small, backlit, and slightly less comfortable and intuitive.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

I also have the PC app on my old hp tc1100 tablet. I have to make Sure to keep my forearm vertical while holding it, but it works well for me.

pyre• 16 years ago

> (and I still very much believe that Apple TV is due for a near-term reboot to plug into the same ecosystem).

How would that work? All of the other devices are based on a touch interface. Is Apple going to break into the television market with a multi-touch TV?

Not to mention that all of the Apps are based on the touch interface, so you would have a hard time using them out of the box on an iPhoneOS-based Apple TV.

jws• 16 years ago

AppleTV is just waiting for the content producers to come into the store. I think perhaps the tail of the announcement where Jobs discloses that there are 125 million accounts with credit cards at the iTunes store is aimed at the content producers.

alxp• 16 years ago

The Remote app is a great way to control iTunes and AppleTV, if they evolve that into a media browser that just tells AppleTV to start playing your content instead of on the screen they've suddenly got the world's greatest media experience.

troystribling• 16 years ago

I think it more likely that the iMac will spawn a TV. The iMac 27 inch is close.

plinkplonk• 16 years ago

The title is pretentious link bait.

Let's see. Who has "Check Mate"d who?? CheckMate is the end of a chess game where one side unambigously wins over the other.

If anything the game is just beginning.

Oh yeah and what is "Google's Next move?" Does the author ever make that clear? Or did he just throw it into the title for effect?

briancooley2• 16 years ago

It is weird to see "75,000,000 people already know how to use it" as a selling point for a device that is also sold as extremely intuitive to use.

root• 16 years ago

See, its so easy that 75 million people already learned how to use it.

teeja2• 16 years ago

75,000,000 says that it is a already very successful interface. Which underlines that 'intuitive' isn't a claim, it's a fact. Because the press needs things spelled out.

scott_s• 16 years ago

An intuitive interface is one that is easy to learn - but it still requires learning. That people already know how to use it is orthogonal to how easy it is to learn to use.

briancooley2• 16 years ago

While there are certainly many factors that go into determining the number of users who know how to use a device, orthogonal is a poor word for describing the relationship between people who know how to use the device and ease of learning. The two are definitely correlated, IMO.

Consider the extremes. Something that was impossible to learn would have zero users that know how to use it. Everyone would know how to use a device that required no learning.

It's this latter hypothetical to which the iPod/iPhone/iPad aspire. So why should Apple care to make the point that so many people already know how to use it?

After some thought (and I may be slow to the conclusion that everyone else has come to already), I think it is because they knew that "It's just a big iPod Touch" would be one of the main objections. This particular point about the 75MM users was an attempt to turn an aspect of the device that could be perceived as a big negative into a postive.

For me - the relatively uninitiated into the world of pitchmen - it's an interesting piece of marketing.

teeja2• 16 years ago

Not only is this an insightful article, but the one it refers to at its bottom is deeply insightful about iPad as a reader ... iTunes LP viewer ... educational potential, etc. http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/09/rebooting-the-book-one-appl...

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

I thought this was awfully shallow by O'Reilly standards.

I didn't catch a single compelling reason that anyone should want to use this device, particularly in preference to iPod/iPhone or a larger netbook. A statement like

But the final bit of noteworthy, and compelling, good about iPad is that this just feels like the device that real people (read: non-techies) are going to flock to.

really doesn't come close to a real argument.

Also, the paragraph

the iPod and iPhone that came before it were truly revolutionary devices, offering wholly new functionality, delivering new value chains, and fundamentally changing the relationship that consumers had with, first their media ... and then their communications.

Seems incorrect to me. iPod was another MP3 player, of which we've had a zillion. iPhone, too, is just evolutionary, in its melding of phone + PDA; really, is it that much of a revolution to add a better UI (even if that UI is great by all accounts)?

And if it's this UI revolution (if it is one) that is going to carry this, then -- as the article admits -- it will do so by cannibalizing existing Apple customers. In that case, how does this affect Google's prospects at all?

fjabre• 16 years ago

A touch screen based ChromeOS would seem to be the logical next move.

Problem with this is the web was developed with point & click in mind.

adolph• 16 years ago

Maybe the author intended to make more of a statement about Apple's emphasis on the relatively full featured operating system over Google's Chrome OS operating system as web browser host? The link at http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1084725 expresses this better.

I'm pleased that Google is there to keep Apple working hard unlike Symbian, Mobile Linux and Microsoft. Checkmate? More like "please keep playing!"

Check Mate: Apple's iPad and Google's Next Move

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