1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong.
2) No one really seems to care.
3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve.
4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't seem to help their situation at all.
5) Both CEOs seem firmly in place still.
While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.
I think you could say that MS is in the same situation with respect to the modern tablet market, that Palm was in with respect to the smartphone market about four or five years ago.
As for the other phone makers, remember Nokia and others have been trying and failing to do the tablet thing for years too. Remember all the clamoring (for years) for Apple to introduce a tablet? It was not because all the Apple rumor bloggers had some clairvoyance about the market that Steve Jobs did not - it was because seemingly everyone else had a tablet out, or would soon, and people were afraid Apple would get left behind.
Microsoft has NEVER really originated a UI paradigm or OS, they just copied/bought/stole stuff from other people, and generally did it badly. (No question they sometimes contribute refinements.)
We're just lucky they didn't try to put a tiny version of DOS on PDAs and a pen driven version of DOS on tablets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI
This video left me with a strong impression of future general computing usage patterns. It has also been my personal gold standard of a superb video demo.
Interestingly enough, they abandoned it right after iPad's release:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier#End_of_Courie...
Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary this concept is, but that's just talk.
I'm not saying that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I am saying that it's not proven itself to be that just quite yet. I don't think the PC is (even close) to dead.
I think a large percentage of the iPad buyers were not techsavvy and the non-threatening aspect of the device is the appeal.
Perhaps the iPad isn't to your taste, but it was to 7 million others. (And some 16 million overall.) One could argue that Apple does, in fact, have the largest consumer base of early adopters and trend followers of any company, but when you fan base grows larger than many other markets, you kind of have to call it main-stream.
I'm pretty sure that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I'm comfortable saying that. But it's something other than a trend at this point.
Two weeks later, they bought another one so they wouldn't have to share.
My parents are early-adopters on nothing. They didn't get a car with air-conditioning until the late '90s. They didn't get a microwave until the mid '90s. That they jumped on the iPad when it came out, and then it won them over so immensely that they purchased another tells me something.
* reading in bed
* reading long PDFs. This is my primary "work purpose". I read a lot of machine learning books and journal articles in PDF form.
* quick checking of email, when you don't want to sit down for a while
* looking up recipes while cooking
* social media sharing: when friends are over, showing them a new video on youtube, etc
Second, that is invariably how a disruptive product is defined. 'I have yet to see a use for 2.5" hard drives beyond certain toy value because the storage space is so limited.'
[1] Of course the iPad is less powerful for those dollars, but we are talking the vast majority of people who have never gotten their CPU beyond 10% utilization except when playing a movie with Flash.
Desks are not going out of style, so whether the PC is dead isn't necessarily the right question. People will continue to sit at desks and use computers. Microsoft's style of a desktop OS, though, could be on its way out. The hardware will be changing. Gamers, high performance computing (science, 3d, graphic design) and corporate networks will be the only ones who really need the 'tower' style computers. People who just want to read mail, browse the web, listen to music and use office software could basically take a tablet and plug in a monitor, mouse and keyboard for desktop use. Which OS they are going to use, how much flexibility it has and what sort of interface is the big question.
The real contest will be between notebooks, tablets and mini-tablets (previously known as phones). To break it down even more, the issue is whether you have a keyboard, monitor and display ports built in.
I'd love to have a tiny slab the size of a 13" Macbook with no monitor or keyboard (so, even smaller!) that I could use as a desktop. Oh, oops... I just described a Mac Mini. Looks like someone is ahead of me here.
7.3m iPads sold so far hardly seems like just early adopters.
Ebooks outsell paperback and hardcover novels (not combined) on the internet's biggest bookseller - we can safely say that many people definitely read ebooks on tablets (assuming we're including Kindle).
When reputable manufacturers bring mainstream tablets (i.e. Android pads that support the Market) to the $300-400 range, I believe that mainstream consumers will give them at least equal consideration with laptops in the same price range.
MS and Intel are still aware of the disruptiveness of "Tablets" (a poor description for the phenomenon, but descriptive enough), but they are chained to their existing org-charts, ship schedules, and revenue streams. Whether or not they'll be able to pivot fast enough is still up in the air.
The really interesting aspect is that the important part in market growth isn't when the disruptive technology takes the lead in marketshare, or when it starts eating into the marketshare of the old guard significantly. Rather, it's the inflection points of growth that are important. When a big company is past its knee (still growing but growing at a smaller and smaller pace over time) while the little guy is growing at a faster and faster pace, that's when to pay attention, because lots of things happen quickly and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast.
If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard.
Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.
Innovator's Dilemma.
The real staggering fact is that it's just not the tablet market. Both Microsoft and Intel are also absent or significantly behind in smart phones, eBook readers, portable media players, connected TVs, and almost every market that represents computing (devices) beyond the PC for consumers.
the server market, for all of my career, really, has been following the consumer market. The stuff you see in a server is basically upmarket desktop kit; the primary difference being the addition of ecc in various places.
If ARM beats X86 on the desktop, within a short number of years, they will beat x86 on the server, too.
Now, arm is a /long way/ from winning the desktop market, and I'm not at all sure they will. I'm just saying... /if/ x86 loses the consumer market, they will also lose the cost-sensitive server market.
x86 only owns the server market because the r&d and economies of scale paid for by the consumer market.
I think there is an anti-tablet culture at MS stemming from the failure of the early laptop-based tablets.
Once MS has a solid hold with Win Phone 7 you'll see that interface transition to tablets.
What about Windows for Pen Computing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing
That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?
So they have been thinking about the tablet space for a while, they just haven't been approaching it the same way as Apple has and I think realized that it would have been a shitty product if they had released it.
Edit: another thing, the top dogs in this space (Google and the staggeringly efficient Apple) have a lot of cash and are much more focused. So if they were to go all in in any market segment their money is likely to go a lot further than it would at Microsoft.
And this is coming from someone who has never paid a cent to Apple. I haven't drank the kool-aid but none of these touch devices appear to really be competing with Apple. They look like they are struggling to catch-up. These devices always have some combination of a bigger price tag, buggy interfaces, crappier specs, and/or way less software available.
I'd rather see these other vendors go a completely different direction. Microsoft releasing an iPad clone this late in the game would just be embarrassing. The Kinect was a good response to the Wii. The Playstation Move was not. (I'm making assumptions here since I'm not a gamer. I have no idea whether the Move/Kinect are successful or not.)
I don't really care for apps, I only need a good browser, video and skype functionality.
I have considered the Galaxy Tab, but as reviews said the browser sucks I passed (plus, it was very expensive).
Looking forward to Honeycomb lot...
Hi my name is Tux.... I don't make Steve Jobs rich(er) and I'm the greatest developer operating system ever made.
These days I just own a nice laptop and a clamshell cell phone. I don't even have a camera anymore.
Can someone explain to me why the ability to browse the web from the couch without sufficient text-entry possibilities is going to challenge the amount of pc's in a world where textentry is our main method of searching, sorting and creating data. Honestly, this is not a rhetorical question, i feel i'm missing some part of the picture here.
People do write. In Twitter-sized chunks. That is why Twitter is so popular. But you can compose a Tweet on a touchscreen keyboard. I'm sure that's especially true if you have been to middle school in this century and have lived the life of the text messager.
But that's just part of the answer. The real answer is that the PC isn't going anywhere. But that's not enough to make an "era". As Bruce Sterling once said: We very likely have better flint-knife technology today than they did in the flint era, if only because the flint-knapping enthusiasts can swap secrets on the net and share a global collection of books, videos, and meetups. But that doesn't mean we are in any kind of "flint era". We have more paper and more pens available today than ever in history, but we don't speak of the pen-and-paper era. And there is more rock music being played today than in 1968 and yet we think of then, not now, as more of a "rock era".
An "era" is defined by newness, disruption, and the smell of profit. The modern PC platforms are between fifteen and twenty-five years old and have changed little in the last decade. Major parts of the industry have seen their margins shrink to near zero. Others are profitable but only for a tiny handful of big players. This doesn't mean history is over - I refuse to believe that, say, Adobe Photoshop circa 2011 is the last word in image editing for the next hundred years - but to change the PC market from within is a long hard slog. The build-out of mobile will be a lot more fun to watch.
We went to Italy this past summer. We took my iPhone (data turned off), an iPad 3G, my SLR, and her camera. Because I couldn't find someone locally to sell me a photo tank, I also had to take an Airport Express, a netbook, and a card reader to save the pictures I took (I didn't have the camera connection kit at the time). Except for that, we did not use a laptop. We used the iPad extensively in Italy, paying our bills, making calls on a SIP client, browsing the web, writing blog posts, and even uploading edited photos to a photoblog at http://aureolastatua.tumblr.com. We didn't once feel like we were missing out on anything or that we needed to go to an Internet cafe. The portability was astounding. We needed a laptop in 2006 when we went to Europe to do much the same.
The second anecdote is current. When I get home, I rarely get on the single "real" computer unless I'm programming. When my wife is doing report cards, I can't get on until shortly before bedtime. In years past, I would have quickly been annoyed by this and gotten a laptop by now. I don't need it for my evening browsing—because of the iPhone and iPad.
The PC isn't going away, but it's not going to be the main screen soon. That screen won't be the iPad 1, either. It'll be g4 or g5, but it will happen. I don't need a "real" computer for a lot of what I do, anymore.
My objection then was UI, both on the input and output side. In a way, wifi and bluetooth have solved a lot of that, as they can offload the heavy duty stuff to wireless sometimes connected displays and keyboards.
At some point, we're likely to have enough power in a cellphone to run most of what you'd want to do for day to day stuff. And do it all day on a charge. Couple that with always on networking and the availability of machines in the cloud for bigger jobs, you start to be able to have the phone/tablet be most of what you need.
What? They announce the first version of a product early because, being the first, it can't stop people from buying the previous version. If they announced the new iPad now, iPad 1 sales would tank.
* If they announced the new iPad now [and release it in a "handful of weeks"] iPad 1 sales would tank. [and iPad2 sales will skyrocket]
The Xserve is the only recent example I can think of, and they discontinued that product recently. I'd be surprised if Apple makes a TV.
There were smartphones before the iPhone that seemed similar (or even better) in specs/features.
There were tablets before the iPad.
Apple in entertainment takes old categories and adds a new product/platform that excels along some evaluative dimension(s) that people weren't even previously conscious of – not by simply outdoing the incumbents in the same-old dimensions.
I think there are plenty of ways an iOS/iTV could break the old moulds. Adding basic integration with the iOS ecosystem – docking ports, media sync/backup, iTunes purchases, handhelds as remotes/controllers for big-screen content and games, Facetime – would be plenty to excite the gotta-have-it Apple households for a successful v1 release.
Throw in new voice/gestural controls (as with Kinect) and app APIs that work with live and recorded TV programs – including iAds targeted to individual households. ("This episode is available for $1.99, or with 3 customized-for-you commercials.")
That'd be a new platform for digital TV, bound to Apple/iOS – "fundamentally different" enough for me!
Ever since Gruber's initial review of the iPad, I've been intrigued by the possibility of a Pro model with more RAM and possibly some extra horsepower. Again, it doesn't seem like Apple's plan though.
I'm sure the new version will have a spec bump. Whatever that ends up meaning (dual core, faster, more RAM), it will continue to be plenty.
The ipad is a second class browsing experience not because of the lack of flash, but the lack of cache. It's just not anywhere near as snappy reading as a Real Computer(tm) because it's constantly reloading stuff that's been purged.
My usual style of reading (on the desktop) is to pop open a pile of stuff in tabs, then batch read through. Can't do that on the iPad.
Safari could also use a few more cycles to make it seem that much snappier. While it feels like magic, and I would have killed for its browsing performance a few years back, it just doesn't feel quite there yet.
Also, just in the last month or so, I've noticed some sort of background task that causes stuttering in some places. (mainly in angry birds). For the first time, I've noticed that I needed to restart it. Its' a small thing, but it's also the first time I've had to resort to computer troubleshooting on it.
But that's still pretty anemic, as jonhohle noted: that's not enough to keep a lot of pages in Safari's cache. (Though, from my experiments, Safari/WebKit is REALLY aggressive about minimizing memory usage, perhaps even stupidly.)
So why did HP announce their entire 2011/2012 line up and direction of products without a price and or release date?
I think that this means HP has stake holders breathing down their neck, and they had to publicly show their hand asap. Thoughts?
Imagine mixing digital paint with your fingers (on the touch screen that replaces the physical keyboard on current laptops) then actually painting on the other touch screen (the touch screen replacing the non-touch screens on current laptops).
Why Microsoft killed Courier, I'll never know.
More memory means will be able to do more things, load up bigger files into mem.
Just because you can build a camera (or two cameras) into everything doesn't mean you should. Cameras are a certain size and shape for a reason.
I see no reason to build a rear-facing cam into the iPad. Ever tried to hold a slippery, 7.5" x 9.5", 1.6 pound slab at arm's length before, and hold it steady? Not compelling.
Then again, maybe the biggest lesson out of the touch screen revolution is that its not the hardware - it's the software, and Apple has been certainly setting the pace on that front.
If a phone company introduces a new phone, and then a few weeks later introduces a better phone, they've to some extent limited the market for the first one to the people who happened to hit the end of their contracts in that few weeks. Given the two year contract cycle, a phone a year makes a lot of sense (assuming your phones are good enough that it takes the competition several months to match or best them--as has been the case for Apple so far).
The iPad... might see faster than 1-year cycles because there is no contract, per-se (of course the competitors keep screwing that part up, so maybe not).
1. Releasing the iPad in September makes no sense simply because it was such a massive hit in the holiday season. Generally speaking, you want to spread out your demand as much as possible. It took 2 months to get the previous iPad from the US to the first round of international markets and another 3-4 months to do the full round. You can only produce so many. Actually not being able to buy one because demand is so high is not Apple's style;
2. I don't see Apple releasing a new version 6 months after the previous, particularly when, in all likelihood, the iPad 2 won't have been in some markets for more than a month or two.
As far as conflicting reports on parts and specs, that's nothing new. Just like there were reports of a CDMA iPhone YEARS before there was one. There are two reasons for this:
1. Apple produces far more prototypes than they release (eg the CDMA iPhone was tested for about a year before release); and
2. People just make stuff up for page views.
I also fully agree with Gruber on a rear-facing camera making very little sense on a device that large.
A rear-facing camera makes little sense if you imagine the use is for people to walk around taking pictures like they would with a phone. However, when you start imagining uses like Augmented Reality or other situations where you're interacting with real world artifacts, then it makes a little more sense.
It took about 5 months for the initial iPhone to get out of the US. By the 3G's release, iPhone was in 6 countries (USA, France, Germany, UK, Ireland and Austria).
The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 22 countries (though the 3GS backed out a bit, release day for only 8 countries and the rest staggered over 2 months)
HP's new TouchPad won't have that. It will probably do well, but it won't even touch the success of the iPad. Nobody writes apps for WebOS.
But HP doesn't seem to be hyping or publicizing this at all. No shout-outs to developers. No "here's our SDK, here are some screencasts and tutorials". They exist, but they aren't being advertised at all. Apple has conferences where they get developers excited about working on apps.
Microsoft clearly seems to have taken their own sweet time to make an entry but they clearly have an intent and when they do, the biggest thing that they will have going for them is the knowhow of the platform and a plethora of apps that are already existing there that will be easy to port.
Just like mobile this will end up being a 3 horse race in a few years. Apple, Google and Microsoft. The rest of them are just wasting their time and money in competing. None of them have existing ecosystems or platforms that they can leverage to fight with the three big players.
Rather than reworking the UI to be suitable to touch interaction, they wanted to force you to use a stylus and pretend you're using a mouse.
As great as the new HP stuff looks, I wouldn't like to be HP, RIM (or Nokia and their potential Meego tablet) right now...tough road ahead building app ecosystem momentum. Who cares if the tablet is slightly better when I can't get my favourite apps.
I find it greatly amusing the roles are reversed from back when Apple struggled on the desktop due to lack of apps while microsoft dominated. My how times change in 10 years. At least this time we might have more than one platform that dominated 90% which is good for everyone.
Are holiday buyers really the same kind of people who will have even heard gadget rumors, let alone coordinate their purchases accordingly? Do we have any reason to think many of them held off this year?
Furthermore, I thought the speed of iOS updates has been a good thing. Why are three iOS targets undesirable or problematic?
It just sounds... flimsy; like someone shopping for justification after they'd latched onto a conclusion.
The default expectation is that iPads will hit in late March. So we're talking about rumors relating to devices that may exist three to four months after the decision of "what are we getting Sally for Christmas" gets made.
And Gruber thinks average people will hear those rumors and then be willing to disappoint a loved one on Christmas over a spec bump they have no context for?
And, again, I wonder aloud if we have any indication that this happened this year. Because we all heard rumors and those things flew off the shelves anyway. So if it didn't happen this year, why would anyone expect it to happen next year?
Gruber needs to make the leap and become a political talking-head on cable news already.
Unleashing lines like that without a hint of sarcasm or irony? You can't teach that, folks, that's god given.
346 million PCs were sold worldwide in 2010, Apple sold 15 million iPads so far. That’s still a long way off but it is not impossible, especially with other manufacturers bringing their devices to the market.
This is a reasonable prediction. It might well be wrong but it is reasonable. Calling tablets “the future of personal computing” with such a prediction in mind seems perfectly justifiable to me. Don’t ridicule other reasonable opinions just because you disagree with them!
If you want to look at it by comparison to the iphone led smartphone revolution, the timeframe there was:
first iphone release: 1/2007
first android phone: 10/2008
first touchscreen BB: 11/2008
first webos phone: 6/2009
(all dates courtesy of the wikipedia articles for the specific phones or OSes)
and then you didn't really get a phone which competed well with the iphone until, arguably, the nexus one which was in 2010 (or even the Pre which was middle of '09) making it a full 2.5 - 3 years later.
The point is that this stuff progresses in fits and spurts over a long period of time and that the next six months are going to be no more significant than the six which follow it, contrary to what HP's and Motorola's marketing people tell you today (or Apple's will in a few weeks time).
This would be most useful on a device with a daylight readable transflective screen. Then you could use it outdoors with augmented reality apps.
I think this would make for an awesome museum AR experience.
That's more than a little hard to swallow...
* Apple will keep April as the refresh month for iPad. Putting iPad in the same iPod event will steal thunder and is no good. And component supplies is tighter for iPad thus it takes few months to meet the demand and September is too tight to the holidays season. When iPad 2 is launched in April, the rest of the world will get it by Jun-Aug which ensure Apple can manufacture enough to meet year end holiday demand.
* There will be no iOS 5 this year. At June WWDC, Lion will be the focus and Apple will give sneak peak of iOS 5 at the event, with beta available in early 2012, ship in June 2012. Aple needs to get its developers ready and it takes time. iOS 5 will share the code base of Lion and will ship after Lion. iOS 5 will include user interface elements changes. I think Apple is keeping two years release cycle for major OS release.
* There will be iOS 4.4/4.5 this year for: iPhone 5, NFC capability, AppleTV 3, App Store for AppleTV and App/Games on AppleTV.
With Apple they have the whole underlying principle of "Think Different" or something along the lines of changing the status quo. Apple didn't really do anything new with the iPhone and iPad in essence. Smartphones and tablet PCs were already out there. However because it went with their overall message, it made sense. People wanted to include it in their "Apple Lifestyle" so to speak.
Just my .00002 cents.
