iPad

Showing 214 posts tagged iPad

The Loop Magazine

Following in Marco Arment’s footsteps, Jim Dalrymple has released a bi-monthly magazine on Apple’s Newsstand. 

I really like the movement towards self-publishing of original content that is paid for by the readers (The Loop Magazine is $1.99 per month). And I love the move away from the bloated 700 MB magazine downloads that big publishers puke up once a month.

Here’s more in Dalrymple’s own words.

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins during an interview at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles yesterday.

Oh boy. Heins may want to check with Apple on their tablet business, because it sure seems like a good model. 

There are some quotes that I’m pretty sure will come back to bite someone in the ass. This one I’m sure about.

I’ll make my own prediction: In five years, tablets will be an exponentially bigger business than BlackBerry, because BlackBerry will no longer exist.

The Touch-Screen Generation

Fascinating read by Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic about children growing up with access to tablets. Two favorite parts:

Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to accommodate that now-common tableau.

And:

Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers. Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens. A “rattle on steroids,” is what Buckleitner calls it.

A rattle on steroids. I like that.

So if this number is accurate, and if my math is correct, Apple sells as many iPads in roughly 6 days as Microsoft sells Surfaces in roughly 6 months. Update: From Ian King & Dina Bass’ story for Bloomberg: Microsoft has sold little more than a million of the Surface RT version and about 400,000 Surface Pros since their debuts, according to three people, who asked not to be named because sales haven’t yet been made public. The company had ordered about 3 million Surface RTs, they said. Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS AG, had initially expected Microsoft to sell 2 million Surface RT devices in the December quarter alone. Yikes. And: Microsoft is taking steps to turn around the tepid demand. The software maker is trying to rejigger its marketing for Surface RT, said two of the people familiar with the company. Microsoft executives have said internally that they failed to persuade some customers to choose Surface over Apple’s iPad or Samsung’s tablets, which run on Google’s Android software, one of the people said. Marketing. Good luck with that. High-res

So if this number is accurate, and if my math is correct, Apple sells as many iPads in roughly 6 days as Microsoft sells Surfaces in roughly 6 months.

Update: From Ian King & Dina Bass’ story for Bloomberg:

Microsoft has sold little more than a million of the Surface RT version and about 400,000 Surface Pros since their debuts, according to three people, who asked not to be named because sales haven’t yet been made public. The company had ordered about 3 million Surface RTs, they said. Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS AG, had initially expected Microsoft to sell 2 million Surface RT devices in the December quarter alone.

Yikes.

And:

Microsoft is taking steps to turn around the tepid demand. The software maker is trying to rejigger its marketing for Surface RT, said two of the people familiar with the company. Microsoft executives have said internally that they failed to persuade some customers to choose Surface over Apple’s iPad or Samsung’s tablets, which run on Google’s Android software, one of the people said.

Marketing. Good luck with that.

Apple's Proposed Wireless Charging Smart Cover

Mikey Campbell of AppleInsider looks at a newly-unveiled patent filed by Apple:

Instead of sourcing power from a stationary dock, Apple’s invention calls for a tablet case, or more specifically an iPad Smart Cover, to hold the inductive power transmitter. In some embodiments, an internal battery is disposed within the case, basically creating an “on-the-go” wireless charger.

That’s a good idea. Hope it happens.

Microsoft's top-secret Surface prototypes

Good stuff from Tom Warren for The Verge. This, in particular, sticks out:

The exact timing of Surface development is still a mystery though, and Panay refused to comment whether the iPad was available before work started on Surface. The official timing statement is that the Windows 8 design vision was locked before the iPad and that Apple’s tablet validated a lot of the vision for Microsoft’s new operating system.

The idea totally just came to them out of thin air. I’ll quote Marc Andreessen from a couple months ago:

There’s a pattern in our industry. Apple crystallizes the product and the minute Apple crystallizes it, then everyone knows how to compete.

Tablets Playing Out More Like Smartphones, Not PCs

I’m generally wary of these estimates (see: netbook projections from a few years ago), but even if IDC is off by a lot, this should be extremely troubling for Microsoft:

IDC said tablets running Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform would grow their market share from 1 percent last year to 7.4 percent in 2017.

Tablets running the Windows RT operating system, which is not compatible with older software that runs on Windows, will see their market share stay below 3 percent through 2017, IDC said.

The tablet market is expected to be close to 200 million units shipped in 2013. According to IDC, the iPad will control about half of that market with all the various Android tablets controlling the other half. Microsoft will be a non-player.

And even by 2017 — four full years from now — IDC doesn’t think Microsoft will control even 10 percent of the market. Yikes.