Too much excitement or big deception

by Jérôme ~ January 28, 2010

News, blogs, they all behave the same way, they need to focus their attention on something so they can write on a daily basis. The last excitement was yesterday Apple event. Apple announced they will present their “latest creation”. The news people, and most of the bloggers took this announcement and, of course, guesses, rumors, gossips, and some leaks amplified the unknown content of the event. Some even compiled a to-do list of what Apple should do on the next installment of the iPhone OS. Dude! Do you think, two weeks prior an event Apple will read your blog and implements what you are looking for right away? People went crazy even stupid about all of this. The Apple tablet information was already leaked (thanks to France Telecom). The title of the event was “latest creation” not latest creations. Even a 5th grader can notice the difference, it was only about the Tablet.

With all the big Apple fans, I watched the Apple event on engadget yesterday when Lord Steve Jobs, presented Apple’s newest gadget: the iPad. When I first read the name of the tablet, my head went crazy, filled up with bad jokes about the name… iPad/iPod confusion will be common now. Is that a smart name for an oversized iPod? Time will tell. The time I recover from the name, Steve was sitting showing how cool it is to surf the web with the iPad and (argh… it still hurts!) no Flash. No Flash! What the hell is wrong with Apple, three major iPhone OS releases, constant request for Flash support, and no Flash on the “latest creation”? My eyes started to get wet, I was about to cry.
The following points of the presentation were nice, great display, user friendly, pretty much what you expect from Apple. Then comes the interesting parts, iPhone Apps will work on the iPad, iTunes (of course), new games. Playing FPS without a mouse or a controller remind me back in the day when I had to play with the keyboard keys W, S, A, and D. The iPad introduces the iBooks, I think, regarding the device it was necessary to add this functionality. Can it compete with Amazon Kindle, it might, there are pros and cons and my feeling is that it will not work. I am pessimistic by nature. Phil took the spotlights for the iWork integration, I loved it, shinny and looked usable. But the most important part was the pricing. $499 for a useless iPad and $729 for a decent one. $499 for a giant iPod Touch or $729 for giant iPhone.

All of this remind me the launch of the MacBookAir. Pricy, technologically advanced, and absolutely useless.

Would I want to spend $729 for a downgraded version of a laptop, where, and here is the best part, I cannot install anything I want, it has to go through the App Store process for approval. I will not be able to watch videos because, it supports only H.264 and no Flash. At least the iPhone is a phone. The iPad will end up in the next 15 years top-10 of commercial failure with its distant cousin, the MacBookAir. This show was not a presentation of a new product, it was a show for Wall Street, just to present the engineering potential and boldness of Apple to create, implement, and stand by cutting edge technology to the public. In the next two years, no one will talk about the iPad, the same way the MacBookAir have been forgotten.