Apple’s Plan to Conquer the World
The Apple iPad was released over weekend, and there was tremendous publicity and no small amount of punditry on the topic. Of course, as is only fitting for something released on Easter weekend, the Apple fans have said it’s the greatest thing ever, about to change the whole market, and no doubt going to raise the dead, heal the sick, and make the lame whole. Naturally, there are also the naysayers, a lot of whom have concentrated on how the iPad can’t possibly live up to the hype. In particular, they noted that the iPad isn’t going to save the magazine publishing industry because, as one research report put it (in all caps in the original):
Even if iPads fly off the shelves magazines will still only realize a small percent of their overall print revenue.
So let’s cut through the hype for a few minutes. Yes, I do think the iPad is a pretty terrific device. (I should have a review of my first experiences with one in the next couple of days.) It’s not something unexpected, though — it’s really the first halting steps toward the “next computer” I predicted two years ago in one of my first pieces in PJ Media. It will change the world of computing, maybe as much as Google did, but don’t depend on it to raise the dead or even cure your cold.
And the question of whether it will save the print magazines is, at the heart of things, asking the wrong question, because it’s being put in terms of revenue.
Let’s take a magazine as an example, say Newsweek since they’ve been talking up the iPad. Think about the business model: Someone has to write content, edit it, typeset it. Then the content is printed on glossy paper and shipped all over the world. The printing process is expensive, the paper is expensive, the shipping is expensive, and seven days later it’s all waste paper. If you look through the financial statements of publishing companies, you find that printing and shipping dominates all their other costs. In fact, I looked at the New York Times last year and found that the cost of producing the physical paper is actually about twice the cover price — they try to make up the difference with advertising revenue.
Unsuccessfully, as it happens.
What’s not obvious, though, is that financially, the tail is wagging the dog. The editorial costs, the cost of making the content, are way overwhelmed by the cost of making the big bundle of paper. So we don’t need to make up the revenue — most of the revenue was going toward something we’re not going to provide any longer.
Existing publishers are worrying about how to prevent their electronic publishing business from cannibalizing their print publishing business; they have made arrangements with e-book publishers to keep the prices high enough to at least stay close to the price of a printed book.
Mr. Martin,
My compliments on a well-reasoned article. You’ve cut through a lot of the emotional hyperbole to get at the “meat” of the matter.
Functionally, print media is either dead or dying. Let’s face it, how many cities have two or more daily papers anymore? I can remember the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat fighting each other (one more liberal, one more conservative) for the hearts-n-minds of Missourians – fighting for decades.
Then the Globe up and dies. This was 25-odd years ago, and has been repeated in big cities all across the country. Ditto for national magazines and other publications. Frankly, I’m amazed that the delivery model has lasted this long, but, in truth, there has been no other effective tool to replicate the conventional model.
Until now.
Yes, the interwebs are fantastic, but I really hate the experience of using my laptop to acquire and read content, especially when I’m trying to have a coffee & bagel on the balcony in the morning. The iPad (Mine is on order – waiting for the 3G version) seems to go a long way toward seriously redefining that model – and doing it in a way that’s better for the consumer, not the publisher.
I am more than happy to pay for content. I love my WSJ, but I won’t pay them $18/mo to read it on my iPad, it’s just too expensive for the value. If WSJ won’t price the product reasonably, then I’ll look elsewhere.
What I am hoping for is to be able to get my Dallas Morning News, WSJ and Texas Monthly all “pushed” to my iPad, as soon as they’re published, and all for a reasonable price. I’d even be happy to renew my subscriptions to Motor Trend, Car & Drive and Guns & Ammo – and a few more – if I didn’t have to deal with that stack of waste paper each month.
Just think, we’re on the brink of solving another terrible crime against humanity: Mr. Jones, my 62-year-old neighbor won’t be bending over to get his morning paper wearing only his much-too-short bathrobe. Thank Ya Jeebus!
Steve Jobs have been trying to create the Dyna Book since the 80ties. This is yet another step in that direction. Somewhere inside Apple, scientists are working hard at speech recognition technology – The last piece of the puzzle. The Apple Newton was probably the first attempt to using a hand held device as a vehicle to develop the Dyna Book technology. The iphone was an attempt to get a little closer to his goal using the mobile phone market. The ipad is yet another nudge closer using the e-reader, the portable video player and the Hi-fi markets. The most logical last step will be a gadget sized between iphone and ipad with speech recognition. And he’s probably gonna call it Dyna Book. Then he can die in peace. Not that he should die, but he will have accomplished what he believes is his life’s mission.
I dont think apple can conquer the world, but it will earn a lot of money!
I’m sure the iPad is a marvel of technology and will revolutionize certain things, but there is no comparison with reading a newspaper in the living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, train, coffee shop or wherever you carry a light, flexible, recyclable, disposable, functional piece of paper.
The challenge is in producing a paper which content can be efficiently downloaded, printed and distributed at a low cost. Maybe the iPad can be part of the solution . . .
I have no doubt that devices like iPad and Kindle will kill off the traditional print business. Even if traditional publishing finally embraces the digital age, there is still the problem with content and layout – two problems that will continue to bedevil those making the leap.
First, publications such as Newsweek and the NYTs will continue to discover that the Web is competitively content rich and those readers who have abandoned them in the paper world probably won’t come back to get the same-old-same-old political agenda posing as “objective” reporting in the digital world. For example, why read any content written or influenced by the god-awful Elanor Clift when there is so much better content out there?
Second, for many digital content consumers like myself, I avoid like the plague Web articles that are spread across multiple pages, requiring multiple clicks to read. This practice to spread an article across multiple pages is an obvious attempt to increase the advertising space opportunity for each article. It also happens to be an incredibly annoying presentation that drives me away (and I bet many others) from those sites with that style layout. Sites that come to mind utilizing this presentation strategy include Popular Mechanics and PC Mag. Both have content I would enjoy, but I can’t tolerate the layout so I won’t even read their content. Instead, I search out blog postings covering the same content and read it in a layout that doesn’t automatically raise my blood pressure. (Not even the great Instapundit linking to a Popular Mechanics’ article can entice me to read the content on that site.)
IMHO, until the traditional magazine and paper publishers jettison their content and layout mindset of centuries, I don’t see them competing effectively with the new media moguls, say like Pajamas Media.
I find multiple page clicks annoying, too. But, in fairness, don’t you always have to flip a physical page when you read a front page story, and with most magazine articles?
The problem that makes this different, it seems, is that computer page flips are incredibly slow, even on a good connection, a consequence of the still-primitive state of browsers and Internet technology in general. If you could virtually flip and have the next page instantly appear, it would be much less annoying.
Of course, not having any flips at all should logically be just one more advantage to electronic media, but centuries-old habits die hard, especially when bolstered (as you point out) by revenue drivers like advertising.
I will not dispute the facts about the death of paper print with Mr. Martin because he is correct. I will dispute whether Apple will end up the dominant player. As with the iphone, someone else will put out a similar device that will provide an open architecture which will inevitably innovate faster and better then the vertically integrated Apple approach. The ipad doesn’t use an intel processor which means it will fall behind in performance. You can count on Steve Jobs to revert to his Standard Oil model of production.
The real problem with the ipad is that by rendering the printed word obsolete you enter the world of the memory hole. The printed word is fixed and unchangeable. The real content will survive any attempt to manipulate it. Not so with the E-word. In E-publishing words can be altered at will without the consumer ever realizing it. If you think the Democratic Party-MSM complex manipulates the news now just wait until there is no paper copy of the New York Times or Newsweek to provide a readily available historical record. Go ahead and praise the new technology as you much as you want because we are about to see the true end of history.
Charlie,
No one can disagree with your take. Dead tree media is going the way of sheepskin. But I think the real revolution will be in redefining genres. The iPad and devices like it offer the opportunity to change the nature of media. Novels can now become conversations between author and reader in the same way online opinion pieces are enriched by Feedback such as this one. Hotlinks to additional information or background can add huge value to the reading experience. Textbooks in particular, will be reinvented – always staying up to date, incorporating video lectures, demonstrations and Discussion groups.
What does all this mean? Yes the NYT as we know it is dead man walking. But there is a huge future in publishing for enterprising people willing to go beyond the Gutenberg paradigm. I think that is what Apple’s vision is really all about.
DD
Pournelle has interesting things to say about all of this. Check out his web site.
Regarding your article I don’t know that your analysis is correct in that it sorta assumes that people will continue to buy papers but in e format rather than paper. I don’t think this is so.
As I see it news aggregators will continue to converge with facebook and/or other social networking tech such that your daily news feed will be customised to your own specs (you would sorta “program” what you want.) Call this “X.” A lot of any given paper is filler. I wouldn’t care to read the sports section whether paper or e delivery. On the other hand drudge report is more focused, as is politico and other topical sites. The future will probably have robots gathering these feeds, parsing the articles for those of your interest, and delivering to your page (i.e. “X”.)
I’d guess papers aren’t going to survive in a way that we recognise.
Books, though, yeah, I agree; my Sony reader already connects to the sony site which is reasonably simple to use for those. What I’m looking forward to now is books with a slight bit more interactive content; e.g. a tome discussing Roman tactics might have battlefield maps that slowly morph so you can see the action unfold. Click on the word “Imperator” to get a pronunciation for it. You can’t do this inexpensively (if at all) in a paper book, and the transfer of useful info to the viewer is much higher.
A couple of limitations in the analysis, brought on by the limitations of the vocabulary.
1) No, the product is not just content. Not for everyone, anyway. Otherwise, Chateau Rothschild wine would come in boxes. So maybe bodice-rippers will be “published” electronically. Literature – not so much.
2) This article ignores the possibility that the impact of the hype will be fleeting. I have no idea what an iPad looks like, or what it does. And I am completely incurious. Unlike times past, when I was a gushing newbie and bought a 128k Mac, I now have no incentive to participate. Why should I and the millions like me give up the weekend habit of visiting independent booksellers to join the teeming millions (a) lining up at a big box “electronics” store, and (b) downloading the latest “fiction” from rihannatriestowriteabook.com?
In the end, of course, this will be a good thing, because book stores, when they abandon the crap that never should have been published on paper anyway, will stop being coffee shops with magazine racks and play areas.
The iPad and its descendants will be a safety valve that lets the ephemera out of the system.
So yes, bring on the iPad, but please don’t it “publishing.” What Hollywood does isn’t called “publishing” – why should this be? It’s almost as bad as calling what television does “programming,” instead of “competitive scheduling.” (Thanks to Ted Nelson, in “Computer Lib,” for this distinction.)
I agree with you on the inadequacies of the language, disagree on the point about the wine. The distinction is that wine is a physical thing; we keep it in bottles, with corks, at least in part because that’s best at preserving the desired qualities — which is in part because we expect qualities that come from the bottles and corks. “Content” is, in essence, just bits: we could print it out anywhere, we can play it anywhere.
Do printed Books require batteries? They are portable, non-volatile and all the other good qualities a book needs. I’ll stay with them for a few more decades.
If civilization completely collapses, sure, I can still read my printed books. Although I might have more pressing concerns.
Meanwhile, it’s not all that convenient for me to haul around a couple hundred books, fiction and non, on any number of subjects that I can resort to in those dead spots during the day away from home. I can do that on my iPod Touch, and now the iPad. I like that a lot.
There’s a place for both, choice really is good.
Apple can’t control this any more than they can control the smart phone or the media player. Yes, this will catch on and evolve. But Apple will do very well if they can hang on to a 50% market share.
You can get awfully rich on a 50 percent market share.
One valuable service that Amazon provides is the ability to re-download content that has already been purchased. It is a smart move on their part. I can buy content from them without having to worry whether I will be able to recover lost files.
The iPad is okay, but Apple’s way behind in this race. Plastic Logic’s products are better IMO, and because they are partnered with B&N (and their recent maneuvering to be the big dog in digital publishing sales) may be in a better position to become the default high-end readers.
And, exactly, can it do beyond serve up ebooks?
I do more than just read ebooks, including some writing.
Every new invention goes through the early stage of being an obsession of only the elite techies. The real money is earned after the unwashed masses perceive a genuine need. We want it to be a mere commodity product. This new Apple item will not interest me until the price drops to something like $50.00 and it is difficult to damage. Dim witted Reactionaries like myself also prefer to have other people deal with the initial bugs. User friendliness is of utmost importance. Spending hours studying the accompanying user manual is not in the least bit enticing. I don’t want to do much more than deal with the on/off switch.
Completely agree. And spent decades as a systems engineer in the forefront of the computer revolution.
Other than the fact that Itunes is the *worst* vehicle for content, well reasoned.
“Other than the fact that Itunes is the *worst* vehicle for content, well reasoned.”
AMEN! iToons downloads are substandard. I’ll still w/ a physical CD, thanks.
I wish you people would have a better way of doing this comment stuff you do for eyes on the internet, allowing people impersonating other people posting on your comment pages, as is the case with this one who is none other than Craig Oates for Studio City California and posting under my name nonsense I wouldn’t say.
Here’s his home page under his alias name of Ace Steele
http://www.myspace.com/acesteele1
Wow. I think this is actually spam — some guy advertising his MySpace page. I don’t see anyone else posting as Craig Oates for certain.
But if it is, it’s creative enough I think I’ll let it pass.
This time.
I bought Apple @$4.10 … guess it was a good investment.
Right. And I remember when VCR tapes were going to replace classrooms and teachers because now all content could be recorded and replayed anytime, anywhere.
The iPad will not change the world because it doesn’t do anything that other devices don’t do better. It’s too big to be a phone, so you won’t be carrying it around everywhere.
And it needs a case to hold it upright and a real keyboard — hey waitaminnit, we already have those, they’re called laptops. And those laptops support Flash, multitask and have tremendous storage capacity; all things the iPad does not.
iPad will exist as a novelty and not much more.
I think the newspapers are missing a bet by not charging a few pennies per article for reading instead of a monthly fee. I WILL NOT PAY a monthly subscription price, but I would seriously consider subscribing to a quality newspaper that charged me per article up to $.25 each and 1 credit card charge per login. At that price I’d probably pay more than I do now for a subscription to my daily newspaper.
David, that’s a good idea, but runs into a practical problem of making micropayments. Right now, a credit card transaction is relatively expensive Something that billed at the end of the month might work out.
Simple solution is do it like celphones that operate with minute charge cards.
You recharge with, say $25 or $50 when the meter runs down close to zero.
Um, Segway.
Neat product? Yes. Useful? Handy? Yes. Design the world around it? Uh, no.
I love the idea of a reader that can hold numerous books, articles, whatever, on a single device. But, the deal killer for me on E-books was when Amazon deleted content off of user’s devices. When I buy a book, it’s mine. You want it, you have to come take it from me. And I’ll still have it in 30 years if I desire to keep it that long. E-publishing is inherently evanescent. Is it REALLY mine? Or do I just have the privilege of perusing it temporarily?
Small correction: iTunes does still use DRM. Two types of media sold in the iTunes store that are not obfuscated are music and iPhone apps.
All television or movies sold on iTunes are obfuscated by Apple’s FairPlay DRM system. Also, audiobooks are obfuscated, and I suspect the new ebooks will be obfuscated.
As far as ebooks on the iPad…
I’ve got @200 ebooks currently on the device, most of them migrated over from my computer and iPod Touch.
Two of them have DRM. About 1/3 were free.
DRM on iTunes has always been driven by the content provider, not by Apple. It’ll take time to pry Sony/MGM/majorbookpublisher’s chubby fingers off the DRM training wheels, and they’ll fight it every inch of the way. And may or may not notice publishers who’ve dropped it passing them up in the marketplace.
The iPad is ridiculously expensive, extremely fragile, and not particularly portable, if its purpose is to replace paperback books, newspapers and magazines, all of which can be dropped in the gutter on a rainy day without any significant financial loss.
I have an iPod Touch in front of me right now. I take it to the gym, and I use it to “consume content”. It fits in the pocket of my workout shorts. Battery life is acceptable; it’s lightweight and can be stashed just about anywhere.
I can’t see how the iPad doesn’t face the same issues that have caused the lack of mainstream interest in tablet computers — which have been available in various forms for the past 20 years.
The explosive growth of the original Palm Pilot, then the Blackberry, the Palm smart phones, the iPhone, and now all sorts of smart phones seems to make it pretty obvious to me that people want extreme portability, not a big, heavy, fragile device. If Apple can make the iPad so it’s rubbery, waterproof to 300 meters, bounces off pavement unharmed, and rolls up like a magazine to stuff in a gym bag or even a back pocket or purse, I’ll be interested — especially if the battery lasts about 25 times as long.
Charlie-
Thanks for a well balanced article – it follows the logic of Chris Anderson in Free. I think Amazon was smart on this – they lead in E-books and they could have not updated the Kindle AP for the iPad but they did. That means more competition. With publishers like LULU I think the traditional publishers will be under a lot of pressure very quickly. The economics of the business are changing.
I liked my Kindle – but the screen of the iPad and the additional functionality are simply better. My suspicion is that a lot of the critics have not actually had hands on. Indeed, the thing cannot fit in your pocket and does not make phone calls. But as a content manipulator I think it has real legs.
All very well-said. I am not as sanguine about the iPad for a few reasons:
1. Your virtual paper costs hundreds of dollars, is very delicate, no more portable than a laptop and can’t be used successfully in bright sunlight
2. No multi-tasking, so the user will have to switch from reader to music player to web browser to app
3. No substantial apps (Word, etc.), a clunky keyboard and very little memory
“1. Your virtual paper costs hundreds of dollars, is very delicate,”
Certainly feels tougher than a number of laptops and netbooks I’ve owned in the past. Seriously.
“no more portable than a laptop and can’t be used successfully in bright sunlight”
Not true for the first, and no worse than reading a book printed on non-cheap paper in direct sunlight. (Which I wouldn’t do for more than a couple minutes if I had any choice at all. Painful.)
Which I just stepped outside to check.
“2. No multi-tasking,”
False. Multitasking is limited by policy (and that may change in the near future, iPhone OS v4 is being announced in a few days) to some built-in applications, and has been in place since long before the iPad was announced.
“so the user will have to switch from reader to music player to web browser to app”
In practice, switching from app to app is fast enough that it’s not substantially different from switching between running applications on a PC. Assuming that the iPad, and similar devices to come on the market, necessarily behaves like your PCs over the past decade in terms of application startup and shutdown times is a best extremely misleading.
“3. No substantial apps (Word, etc.),”
Word would just plain not work on a touch device. Horribly so. Seriously, the current mouse pointer paridigm doesn’t work well on a touch device, which goes a long way to explain why tablet computers have shown so little market penetration to date. Let’s ignore the fact that the iPad isn’t intended to completely replace personal computers; it’s a supplemental device, and fits in areas that desktop machines don’t at all, and laptops only partly.
That said, the iPad already has content-creation applications available.
“a clunky keyboard”
It’s not bad for light text entry (better in landscape than portrait use); if you need more, Bluetooth keyboards work just fine. And if you don’t need/want to haul one with your tablet, you don’t have to.
“and very little memory”
There you go judging on current PC usage/requirements. It’s a different thing. (And frankly, I don’t see 64GB as being “very little memory”. Think about it; it’s a lot faster than a hard drive would be, close to execution memory.)
If you haven’t used one, they’re very responsive. And most of the theoretical arguments against the device just don’t stand up in practice.
Having resisted the iPod since its inception — and wasting untold amounts on pretenders touted as “finally, the iPod killer! — I broke down and bought a 32gb 3rd Generation iPod Touch. It is truly amazing.
After a raft of poorly executed Chinese and Korean wannabes from Creative and Samsung (that all failed to deliver), the Apple iPod is, simply put, genius. It does what I want and is, in a word, elegant.
And I generally hate the very concept of Apple, especially when they do things like boycott Fox News. I’ve been personally disgusted with Steve Jobs since he pulled the rug out from under third party Mac clone suppliers after they committed to Apple OS. Remember Jobs’ lies about how wonderful the Motorola processor was, how fast and, worse, that Intel’s processor was a snail? Then how he dropped Motorola, embraced Intel and obsoleted all the previous Apple software and hardware? Remember how Jobs came hat in hand to Bill Gates and got $50 million from Gates to save Apple, then how Jobs turns around and now physically mocks Bill Gates with an impersonator in his Apple ads? That’s why I’m disgusted.
But American software and firmware programming (both in iTunes and the device itself) and American design (the look, feel, quality and reliability) are clearly superior in the iPod product. The secondary apps can improve the initial software and are reasonably priced. Apple also continuously improves a given device with regular, easily (or even automatically) installed updates…some the Chinese say they do, but hardly ever actually do. Then there’s the simple impediment of the Chinese/English translation of manuals, on-line help and other practical matters.
I say all this to say that the iPad — being an iPod Touch on steroids — ought to perform very well, especially as it matures. Look where the iPod started and where it is today. Remarkable advancement.
However, I will not download NPR, Bill Maher or other content just because it’s free on the iPod.
I do wish there was more PJM on iTunes…whether for iPod or iPad: As was said, Content Is King.
I don’t read the NY Times because they lie…and have lied from the days of Walter Duranty to Jayson Blair, to today.
The reason that the ipod was so successful was the Apple music store (itunes)concept. It had nothing to do with the ipod being something special as a device. I use my Blackberry 8900/w 16 gig as my music player and it is every bit as functional as an ipod. Jobs figured out what every crack pusher knows: once you get hooked them you have them for life. Functionally there is no difference between a Creative Zen, Microsoft Zune or any other player. They all play music and there are now alternative services, i.e., rhapsody, where you can buy the music online. As for me, I still buy the CD rip it to my computor because I only spend my money on music that isn’t disposable like the latest Taylor Swift song.
A Blackberry may be comparable to an old-style iPod, but not a Touch. I have an iPhone and a Blackberry I got for work because they didn’t want to pay for the iPhone anymore. (The Blackberry costs $50 more per month, go fig) They are not in the same category; every time I use the Blackberry I feel like I’m going back in time to the Blackberry I had 4 years ago. It’s not even up to speed with the T-Mobile MDA I had a couple years ago.
My brothers all told me that the iPhone was simply different and I didn’t believe them until I had my own. I played with theirs for over a year and didn’t get it. Not until I’d had it for a couple of days–I finally converted. And I can’t wait to get an iPad–the 3G variety unfortunately, so wait I must.
That being said, I hate Apple with an unholy passion. The evils mentioned are only the smallest part of their evil. They have stabbed their dealers and customers in the back many times, and killed literally thousands of businesses on a whim. Apple is a foul and vile company without compare. Yet I have an iPhone and a Macintosh. Why do I give them money when I hate them so much? Because there’s simply no alternative. I am fully familiar with all flavors of Unix except HP/UX (and I’m learning that now), I’ve used every version of Windows and have two Windows machines running right now, including the I’m typing on this very moment. I’m not just a user, I’ve done desktop support through server installs etc. I’ve fixed hundreds of computers and built dozens (physically, I couldn’t count the number of installs I’ve done).
The fact is, nobody’s got what Apple’s got. I YEARN for the day when somebody will come out with something better. But the fact is Apple is dragging the industry along kicking and screaming; if it weren’t for Apple we’d still be using Windows ME. There’s no GUI to compare, and no matter how you slice it you simply cannot do with a command line what you can with a GUI. I prefer command line when doing heavy stuff like starting and stopping processes, but Wordperfect for DOS is nothing compared to Pages for Mac. What’s more Word for Mac is better than Word for Windows, even though I detest both. Then there’s things like Illustrator and Photoshop. The GUI is just plain better and no way around it.
But so far nobody’s come up with a GUI to match the Mac. (And no, Gnome is not even close. Even Solaris CDE is better than Gnome). Android just plays Windows to iPhone’s Mac. Sure it might become more commonplace, but it’s still the crappy copy of the original. The elegance of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS must be experienced to be believed, and the iPad is built on the same platform. Apple may be vile, and Job may be half genius and half lunatic wannabe Caudillo, but until I see something better I’m going to have to pays the price. Just like voting for McCain last election.
You miss my point exactly. I own a Creative Zen. Paid $185 for it. It is clumsy and oafish compared to the iPod Touch. Yes, they both play music. That’s where the similarity ends.
In reality, the Zen’s Wi-Fi is a joke. No line or digital output. Screen too small. Says it plays WMV’s but ONLY if you convert them with its buggy & slow software. Its music syncing software is Chinese gibberish and attempts to take over my PC, the buttons on the Zen are impossible to use in the dark. Then, within a year, the fast-forward button (used extensively for listening to podcasts) suddenly and inexplicably began acting erratic — going back 45 minutes instead of going forward. It is now a $185 piece of electronic junk. Other than that, the Zen is wonderful.
What I wanted was the same capability I have on my FiOS DVR: press a button to skip forward exactly 30 seconds and another to skip back 10 seconds, pause conveniently and have clear identification of what I’m listening to.
I downloaded a simple 99-cent iPod app called “Skip Ahead” that did this perfectly on the Touch because the OS is open enough that a user out there in Apple-land said, “I need to do this. Apple hasn’t employed it in the OS yet. I’ll write an app for that.” And he did. The app modified the iPod to a user’s needs that happened to coincide with my needs. This simply doesn’t happen with most electronic devices.
Worse, moving to phones, the so-called media player on my Nokia 6555 phone is so bad it caused the Bluetooth to fail, the phone to overheat, kill its miserable underpowered battery and die.
Most of these “we can do it all” phones are similar. The still camera sucks, the movie camera sucks, the media player sucks, the screen is too small, the keyboard is poor, etc.
The Blackberry is the exception, apparently. It has held market share even against the iPhone. Obviously, it works…at least to some degree. But does it let me fast forward and rewind a three-hour podcast? Does it remember where I left off? Clearly display what is playing? Allow navigation three or four different ways amongst thousands of songs all while displaying album art? Sorry. Apple wins. And I don’t like admitting it.
Like a typical applephile you probably don’t know how other technologies have progressed since you last looked at them. Yes, I can take quality happy snaps with my phone. It is also easier to send them with the Blackberry then an iphone. I don’t care how many megapixels your iphone camera has because photography is in the lens; lenses in phones suck. If I want to take real photographs I will use my Leica.
It is easy to fast forward on the media player. You just drag the tab on the bar to where you want it. The iphone, ipod touch and the ipad are toys. I don’t mean that they are not serious pieces of technology but the principle objective of these devices is get you to buy aps that you don’t really need so can play on your device
Then of course you are on the dreaded AT&T network. Here is a little story for you. I was in Germany a couple of weeks with my T-Mobile Blackberry. The network was transparent and I got full service all the time. A friend of mine found that his iphone was pretty much useless. He couldn’t even make calls half the time and he seldom had even full EDGE capability. The iphone as a serious device is a joke because of the network. This isn’t intrinsically Apple’s fault but it is a product of the Steve Jobs’ attempt to develop a completely vertically integrated monopoly so he can extract money from your pocket so instead of selling his device to all providers he gives it exclusively to AT&T where there is no reason to push the technology.
The market for Apple products is dominated by people with an adolescent mentality who want to been seen as cool. For every serious apple user there are half a dozen suckers who spent their money dressing up their device to impress others.
I read this artical on my iPhone; wishing I had my ipad with me. I’m an iPhone/ipad developer and will not comment on Apple because I’m all in.
I will concur that dead tree content delivery is history in he making. I give it no more than 4 years. I learned this lesson with photography. I thought nothing could replace the character of film. I was wrong to say the least.
In the end digital content delivery will be way better than what we have today. It will come to me; it will be cheap; serchable an I can keep it forever. (with a few format changes along the way)
Get ready for an increadable ride!
#21 Barry D — The iPad is ridiculously expensive, extremely fragile, and not particularly portable, if its purpose is to replace paperback books, newspapers and magazines, all of which can be dropped in the gutter on a rainy day without any significant financial loss.
Perhaps you’re missing the point here.
Companies have already demonstrated flexible and waterproof screens in prototype formats. What remains to be solved is the engineering for commercial level production (unit cost.) What this means is that we already know *how* to do most of the things that address your concerns. It just ain’t cheap yet.
What the ipad represents is the test case for the 10″ or so form factor where the UI and such gets proven and usage is studied. If promising then there will be more money available to commercialise some of the newer display tech.
Probable devices a couple of generations from now will be the size of the ipod and coming with a screen that rolls out to the correct size. You can see a decent movie example of the thinking in “Red Planet” (came out a couple of years ago.)
“inexpensive devices like the iPad.” $699 is inexpensive? I wished I lived in your world….
In 1997, Apple was going out of business. Their “visionary” products comprised a whopping 2% of the computing realm. Bill Gates infused the company with $150 million to keep it alive.
Apple wouldn’t be in business if Microsoft and Bill Gates didn’t take pity on them. So it bugs me to see Apple (still a miniscule part of the computer market) mock Gates in their ad campaign.
Steve Jobs would be selling insurance right now were it not for Bill Gates.
I love the smell of revisionism in the morning…
“In 1997, Apple was going out of business.”
A year earlier, perhaps. By ’97 Spindler was gone, and the uninspiring Amelio had stanched most of the flow of read ink. You missed the bottom by just a bit.
“Their “visionary” products comprised a whopping 2% of the computing realm.”
Products like the 4400, or the identical/parallel Performa/Quadra/whatever cookie cutter junk that Spindler’s geniuses were trying to foist on the public. Yep, Scully and Spindler had pretty much burned through whatever interesting had been developed at Apple, and were diving headlong into the low-margin commodity end of the market. With predictable results.
“Bill Gates infused the company with $150 million to keep it alive.”
$150M in non-voting shares (which MS sold off within a couple of years at a nice profit, don’t forget) made all the difference in the world to a company with something like $4B in cash reserves at the time. Not.
MS statement that they would continue to develop applications for the Mac was actually useful at the time, less so after the iMac and later, better products came out. The stock deal was nothing more than cosmetics.
“Apple wouldn’t be in business if Microsoft and Bill Gates didn’t take pity on them.”
Unsupportable on the facts.
“Steve Jobs would be selling insurance right now were it not for Bill Gates.”
Yeah, Pixar never made him any money at all, did it?
Regarding the $150 “investment” in Apple by Microsoft.
As pointed out they bought non-voting shares of Apple. This purchase was part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit regarding patents disputes. As noted MS also agreed to continue to develop and support MS Office for five years. The shares bought in 1997, I believe, were completely sold by 2001 – at a profit.
(by the way Steve Jobs was not at Apple at the time)
Just a clarification of my comment. Steve Jobs certainly was at Apple when the settlement occurred. I was even at MacWorld Boston when it was announced by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates showed up in a video call on the giant screen behind Steve Jobs (like big brother). Jobs specifically noted that it was not a case of for Apple to succeed, Microsoft had to lose. He wanted Apple and Microsoft to work cooperatively together.
What I meant by Steve Jobs not being there was that he was NOT there for the events leading up to and causing the dispute between Microsoft and Apple. He was there to finalize a settlement.
I am a fan of both electronic and paper delivery. The best subscriptions I have are to magazines that deliver via pdf, and give me the choice where and how I want to read. The book publishers are full of crap, because they stop me from printing out a chapter when I need to be able to flip back and forth easily- so I don’t buy e-books. I would gladly buy a newspaper as a pdf. I will buy a non-Apple reader (Kindle looks fine to me, I don’t care for Apple’s arrogance or insistence on dictating my I-O ports by refusing to include USB) when they have truly solved the cross-platform portability issue that currently makes DRM the biggest pain in the dairy area in the history of electronics.
Music on an MP3 is great- but you sometimes need to have a CD. Failing to give consumers a choice will stall the transitions to useful business models.
I agree that printed newspapers and magazines will be scaled way down and largely replaced with electronic content.
I worry that when our journals and records are digitally stored, 1,000 years from now, will historians be able to read it? The ease of deletion and fragility of current storage may prevent our vast records of information from surviving and informing our future decendants. Maybe some history organization should create stainless steel or granite records of modern times. At least something will be preserved.
I’ve often thought about our history being so fragile that it won’t exist in a thousand years.
But what do we know from 2,000 or 1,000 years ago? Very little, really. Their “clay tablet” history didn’t last much better.
They say archeologists will find our ceramic toilets, just like we find ancient pottery. Not much else really lasts unless it’s marvelously protected.
The most amazing piece of ancient history? The Bible.
Well argued article – but it is missing the forrest for the trees. Several types of printed media will do better electronical and others will be much worse.
Temporary data (newspapers, magazines etc.) and data you look up (dictionaries, encyclopedias, reference sources in general) are well suited for digital display.
Data you need to work on to learn or understand (textbooks, philosophy etc.) are less suited – very much so. First try this experiment, read something “heavy” on a screen and then compare it to reading it in hard copy. The electronic screen “fools” you to see what you think is there, not what is there. That is why most people who are serious writers always proofreads the hard copy and not the screen. Next imagine the ease with which you can change an electronic textbook, quite apart from the difficulty absorbing heavy content. If I wanted to rewrite history, this is the perfect medium for erasing inconvenient facts.
So… having used and owned a computer since 1978 I love what it can do for me and believe me I store ridiculous amounts of data for easy retrieval. But for serious and valuable data nothing still beats hardcopy, i.e. a book. Textbooks get outdated – yes – but there are often some gems and margin notes to be revisited on occasion, which is why I have accumulated a rather large library of hardcopy (books) – many with margin notes – over my 38 years as a physician.
There is of cause also the joy of just exploring the printed page in a good book and the now lost fun of cutting the pages so the content can be read. Neither I nor my now adult children will give up on books, nor will we jettison the power a personal computer has given us.
Just my 2¢
peace
Hejde
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.”
Mark Twain
You say that to kill paper the prices must come down, way down, and there has to be a really convenient way to get the content.
With textual/graphic content there also has to be convenience of form. At the moment I can read the same newspaper content online for free as in the printed form but still buy and read the paper because it has “3d” form. You know where you are in a paper, it is very easy to jump around, pick up and drop, just as easy to briefly alight on a sentence, admire (and absorb) an advert/photo or just get stuck into a half page article. Think of a bee moving around from flower to flower. The (good) newspaper website as with Pajamas Media has a very flat bitty feel and while is good for reading specifics, moving around is slow/clunky and does not encourage extensive reading beyond the headlines.
With digital music the converse is true, releasing it from a physical media dispenses with those scratches, crackles and hisses. Then there are the hoops you had to go through just to string some music together that has not been already mixed on an album. In spite of the lossy mp3 compression, for most people unlike online text the quality of music far surpasses that of times past.
Currently, I subscribe to the print and web version of the Wall Street Journal. I have been reading the Journal on my iPad since Saturday and have been so impressed. They did a wonderful job creating a great app to read the Journal. I will be canceling my print edition in favor of their iPad version.
The ‘closed shop’ aspect of the iPad is just part of the nature of Apple.
However I see two things that were unnecessarily ‘greedy’, and one bit of dumb form over function:
Greedy #1:
No built-in SD or micro SD slot. The dongle reader is BS as it destroys the compact, mostly convenient shape. Its one thing to be very protective of their DRM’ed media (IMO 90% of the reason for no Flash support) and apps, but to deliberatley *not* make it trivial for users to just stick in (and leave in) their own memory card for their own photos and mp3s from other sources is crappy. There is no reason the storage could not be kept segregated by the OS, nor to refuse to allow the user a memory expansion option even if only for that limited use.
Greedy #2:
No stylus input. Apparently its a ‘not invented here’ pride. Just because they have done a great job with the touchscreen of making a stylus unneccessary for basic manipulation, does not mean that the precision of stylus input is not textremely handy, whether as Palm OS-type handwriting recognition, or just redlining/markup of documents, or sketching, as e-ink.
Dumb form over function:
The TV ads demonstrate the silly ergonomics, showing the persons hand gingerly over the extreme edge (to keep from covering the screen) or the worse ‘L’ thumb and index finger corner cradle. It should have come with some kind of ambidextrous, removal ridge or grip (perhaps with a wrist strap) like the way a lot of the slightlylarger cameras add a rounded edge to make it more comfortable & secure to hold. Or for tabletop use, some sort of minimalist kickstand. To buy a bulky case to get this, destroying the otherwise small form factor is absurd.
But no, visual ‘sleekness’ ruled the day.
Re the comments about the iPad being just an iTouch on steroids. Maybe it is more like an iTouch on Twinkies. That larger form factor does not bring any more muscle – just more weight and girth. The iTouch can be every bit as powerful as the iPad – powerful enough anyway.
I don’t take a TV with me when I travel – expecting to find them in every hotel, airport, most cafes and restaurants. Likewise I should be able to plug in my own small mobile device anywhere and have an ergonomically comfortable computing experience. Think table top inserts, keyboards and screens everywhere and a complete and familiar platform in your pocket – with all your unique applications and files.
Throw in cloud computing and hosted applications and maybe the real shift being fortold here is the end of the PC as we know it. It could happen.
With regrets I break into this high minded reverie were we imagine Chaucer and Shakespeare our downloaded in Atavaristic 3D. HL Mencken,s popping up all over the IPad universe making blog history as we walk about this electronic village. Nope, the IPad will be a crap magnet, deluxe edition. Porn and Video games are the dominant preoccupations of the average mope who will run out and consume this consumer item. Regrettably some poor sports celebrity will absentmindedly leave one in an airport lounge filled with regrettable content, then it will be fodder for the sloppy masses to drool over on the celeb/scandal bread and circus channel or downloaded onto the web for all to spy. Sigh!
hmmm, interesting post
I was a print journalist for 20 years and worked my way up to a well-paying editorial position. I was one of the good guys — I wrote specialized business newsletters, an industry that has all but died. My job went away — and was replaced with nothing. This article is well-reasoned, but I think it misses the point that the Internet has created a revolution in content, too. Piracy is an issue — but information wants to be free, too.
I watched through the last decade as tenured law professors with obviously too much time on their hands, other tenured and untenured professors, well-educated but underemployed people, unemployed people and people quite obviously blowing off work during the workday began to dominate the early days of blogging. Later, experts began to create expert-level content — for free, on the Internet. We’ve reached a stage now where the classic generalist writer, endangered before the Internet, has become a dinosaur. Even a specialized journalist — that is, a writer who has mastered a single subject (which I’ve done several times) — still must compete against subject-matter experts with decades of experience in their field. Dinosaurs, too, it would seem.
I’m not sure where to go next. Technology undermined journalism and has so hollowed out editorial staffs on newspapers and magazines that there’s very little reporting going on. Traditional print journalists also had a strong agenda that offended a lot of people and motivated them to respond.
Organizations, too, began to loop around the traditional media gatekeeping role and began to speak directly to customers. Governments talk directly to people. Experts are talking directly to readers and creating highly sophisticated individual communities that even a specialized reporter has trouble competing with.
In fact, when I was laid off last October, the company kept a moderately literate (but certainly well below former professional standards) subject matter expert to do my job. (BTW, I trained her to the “moderately literate” stage.) The company figured they could get another editor to rewrite the copy. And they were right — the business results are the same, crappy. Only a few years ago I could make a difference with editorial skills; now it doesn’t matter. Everything’s free and expert-level, or total crap and free. And everything in between.
SEO is changing things somewhat. SEO has already falsified results in most areas, so Google searches are already less accurate. Still, with skilled use of Google, you can still find good info. But you’ll have to wade through a lot of people trying to sell you something.
I’d like to say I can see where things are going, but I can’t anymore. I survived numerous changes in my field. But this combination of free, instant expert content and technological change seems to have killed my career. What I see now is a cacophony and extreme levels of competition. I’ve tried to build a freelance career, and watched companies from India undercut me by an order of magnitude and create barely literate crap to fill up the Internet with keywords.
I was pretty good, too. My bosses said I was one of the best writers they’d ever worked with — and one of those bosses used to run a major wire service.
Worse, I can’t even get a job as a stockboy in my local supermarket. Or anything in between that I’ve applied for. Eight years of education (some specialized in tough stuff, like Unix) and 20 years of experience … to come to this.