The dude in charge of the yellow label empire has told the Wall Street Journal that his company’s internal estimates indicate the iPad has eaten up as much as half of laptop PC market demand. In response to this perceived trend toward more portable gadgets, Brian’s outfit is rearranging its inventory to include more e-readers, tablets and smartphones for this holiday season, while slimming down its selection of desktops and HDTVs.
While I’m sure that Best Buy leaked this information to the Wall Street Journal just to give a juicy hook to the press release announcing that iPads will be available at every single Best Buy location nationwide on September 26th, that doesn’t make it any less of a big deal. (Appleinsider says that the iPad has eaten 25% of the PC notebook market, too.) Last night at a restaurant, I witnessed three older women (probably ranging from their late fifties to their late sixties) handing an iPad around the table, playing with it for a few hours. Love the iPad or hate it, you have to admit that it does seem to have been a transformative device.
No. Popular does not equal transformative. A device is only transformative if it allows you to do stuff previously-available devices didn’t, and the IPad doesn’t.
It is a good device, but those numbers are highly suspect. Notebooks and netbooks will probably hit North of 150M, iPads probably a little North of 25M. Still impressive. Maybe Best Buy customers are special?
This makes sense, given the (previously) growing share of netbooks – other than the difference in price, is there any way a netbook is really better than an iPad? It sounds like the market is saying, “not really, no.”
So it was written by Gene Roddenberry, so it shall be.
“A device is only transformative if it allows you to do stuff previously-available devices didn’t, and the IPad doesn’t.”
I’d argue that it doesn’t, really, but that people *think* it does, which ends up meaning that it actually does. Take those three women in the restaurant. Probably nothing they were doing w/ the iPad was something they could not have done w/ a laptop, but the point is that they were NOT doing it with a laptop, and probably didn’t think they could. Now they can do those things. So it is a transformative device in the sense that it enables people to do things they thought could not be done before, even though they could.
“Transformative?” Nah. It’s just a gadget that takes a limited amount of functions from an already existing device like a laptop and then repackages and markets it to middle class consumers.
The WSJ piece is certainly a corporate-leaked story. And the iPad’s real prowess is more as a testament to the incredible power of mass media marketing driving consumer behavior.
netbooks are shy of 7 million for the next quarter, down from almost double that last year. For reference, Intel sells one million x86 chips A DAY. Netbooks are either going to wither up and die or remain very very niche.
iPad, still don’t know what it’s really for. Form factor is a problem that many people complain to me about (it is tiring to hold as a book, it isn’t good enough to watch movies on.) It’s pretty, but it seems like its immature and will go through a lot of revisions.
My boss got one because he couldn’t read e-mail/text on his iPhone. That one surprised me, but makes sense.
I’ll never own an apple product. Smug shits.
You’re full of shit. The iPad works and it’s awesome. We hate what we don’t understand.