Why it will succeed
- The iPad will crush the Kindle market. It’s cooler, slicker, has a color screen and will have thousands of apps at lau nch. While people can read books and newspapers the bulk of the interesting content is on the web and the web is much better on the iPad then the Kindle.
- The iPad will crush netbooks. It’s a more portable experience and it’s touch enabled. The keyboard is close to full size. The apps are designed to be portable unlike a netbook where you’re trying to use full size apps on a 1/2 size screen. Netbooks are underpowered from a performance standpoint to run typical productivity apps (Office.)
- The computer has traditionally been in the office or the den. This is a move into the living room. If the phone is a communication device and a laptop is for creating content then the iPad is for consuming it and that hasn’t existed before.
Why it is doomed to fail
- The potential owners of the iPad already have an iPhone and a laptop. While some of the scenarios could be better on such a device they are not sufficiently better and the limitations of the platform out-weigh the advantages.
- If the device is a browsing device then the browser makes a huge difference. Because of the closed nature of the iPad we can’t expect to see Chrome, Firefox or Opera on the iPad. Last I checked Safari only had a minority browser share. Add the lack of flash to the equation and a lot of sites will have you reaching for a laptop.
- The iPhone was a success because when the device was released all the existing phones were terrible. The iPhone was a replacement device to something that was flawed. With the iPad it’s not a replacement device. It’s a supplemental device. The problem it’s solving is less of a pain point.
- Basic multi-tasking is obvious and needed on a larger device (music+browsing) or (homework + calculator.) While a single app makes for a simpler experience there’s no reason that I can’t be productive while other apps are loading data, syncing, downloading or doing other background tasks.
I totally disagree with the first two points on why it will succeed. I own a Kindle and I own a netbook. Having used the former for over a thousand hours and the latter for thousands of hours, I can say that the iPad is not a good replacement for either.
The Kindle’s screen and battery life simply cannot be touched by a device with an active screen and a battery life measured in hours. It just can’t.
I use a computer all day long and have for decades, so staring at an active screen for many, many, MANY hours on end is not a problem for me. Yet when I want to read a book, I can tell you from experience that reading a book for five to six hours straight on an active screen is NOT a good experience. /Using/ a device with an active screen is a much different experience because it’s a two-way process of inflow and outflow of information and interactions. Reading books is almost strictly an inflow activity and active screens are terrible at that job for many, many hours on end. You are effectively staring into a light bulb for hours on end. Passing off an active screen as a serious book reader is a joke. Anyone who has owned an e-ink device and used it for serious reading (more than just a quick trip around the block “to see how they like it”) can tell you that.
The battery life of a Kindle is amazing. On a four-hour charge, I can use my Kindle for weeks. Again, that’s weeks, not hours. Weeks! This means that I can lay on the couch on a weekend and read for literally /the entire day/ and not have even an iota of mental nag of, “Hmmm… I should put it back on the charger before I go to bed.” No, I can just lay it on the coffee table and know that I still have another good week’s worth of reading out of it. I can’t describe what that does to the experience of making it feel more like a “book”, rather than a “device that lets me read books”. (And as much of a geek that I am, I still love books more than devices.)
Netbooks are far from the “underpowered” machines you compare the iPad to. I use my netbook for blood and I can tell you that yes, they are underpowered compared to a full-size laptop, but they are far from underpowered for doing serious work. They run the Office suite (2007) just fine. They can also do serious work in a portable form factor. I frequently use my netbook for doing actual, serious application development (using Eclipse and Visual Studio). I also use it for web development and hobby electronics development (Arduino and so forth). No, it’s not /as fast/ as my regular laptop, but it’s /good enough/. There is no way the iPad would be a suitable device for doing easy (but serious), portable development when I’m out and about. The keyboard alone would make that experience terrible.
And there are also the use cases where you have someone who is using their netbook for productivity apps (like Office) and just want to alt-tab over and check Facebook or Gmail or watch a YouTube video someone just IM’ed them about, and then quickly alt-tab back into Office. That’s just not an experience you can have on an iPad, but it’s commonplace on netbooks–just like on regular laptops.
You might shrug off my claims because I’m a “developer/power user/not-your-average-user” and that the iPad is for the “living room” and not people like me, but to do so you would also have to concede that the iPad won’t crush the netbook market. Netbooks are not just the too-small, underpowered, wanna-be laptops you seem to think they are. They have a real use and a real market and the iPad is providing a totally different experience that’s not going to replace those uses, and thus not that market. I think it will capture a small portion of the netbook market that is made up of people who are /trying/ to use netbooks for the experience that the iPad will provide. And I think that’s good.
I’m a netbook user. I don’t have an iPhone or any other smart phone, although I drool over the ones I see and hope to get one soon. I also have a full-size laptop, and of course a desktop.
I am not a power-user, just a typical “on the computer eight hours or more daily” pedestrian. I would not trade my netbook for an iPad if you paid me to do it. The netbook is so portable I can put it in my purse and barely notice it. I use it for productivity every day, as I work on the road and in other people’s offices frequently. I need the office productivity, but I also need the web (for research and entertainment), social networking (for instant contact with friends and colleagues), email apps (for contact), and definitely, definitely, definitely, FLASH (for, oh, I dunno, everything?)
Much of my work is keyboard-intensive. I cannot get a handle on the iPad keyboard. You have to lay it down on a flat surface so you can keyboard two-handed, and thus you lose the critical eye-screen angle that reduces both eye and neck fatigue. Or, you hold it up with one hand and keyboard with the other – another ergonomic nightmare. Or, you can hold it with two hands and keyboard with your thumbs. On a full-size keyboard. Ouch.
In fact, the much-touted iPad keyboard is one of the killing factors for me. Even if the iPad did have flash, and multi-tasking, and better portability, the lack of a functional keyboard is just a deal-breaker for me. OK, the others are deal-breakers too.
I am very curious to see how this toy does in actual sales.