I'm Jon Olick. I make shiny things. I simplify.


I presented Sparse Voxel Octrees at Siggraph 2008.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Has Steve Jobs lost his Mojo?

Maybe its just me but, the iPad doesn't really look very interesting. The hardware looks very interesting, but the software has come up very short. They really should have put mac-osx on it, but in their ultimate greed to control things for their own personal gain, they may have killed a beautiful product. Perhaps they went too far on the greed spectrum that it blinded them of what consumers really want. Consumers expect that a computer of that size to have more freedom. Freedom in applications, freedom in choosing to browse the web with flash, freedom to run many programs at once, freedom to run a development environment if they so choose. (I'm a bit biased with the latter obviously).

Of course, one of the most interesting things is to pay attention to the marketing campaign that they are doing for the iPad. The marketing is stronger and uses more intentionally subconscious cues than the iPhone or any other previous Apple product I can remember. I think this is very telling. They know that the iPad isn't very good, and they are scared.


2 comments:

  1. I actually disagree because I feel the iPad target audience is what I would call the mass-market "Wii consumer". This device is intended for people like my mother, and perhaps even my wife.

    That group does not have the expectations you mentioned and they care about only a very few basic needs. In that regard, the iPhone/iPod Touch is really close to filling those needs, but falls short in several key areas. That is what the iPad fills in.

    In the end, the iPad could actually be the "computer for the rest of us" Apple has long sought after. You interact with it in a familiar non-technical way (my mom, for example, still moves the mouse carefully, lets go, then carefully pushes the left button) and everything functions within its own "safe" bubble. The freedom they sacrifice is freedom most people don't even care to have, and always gives them more problems then solutions.

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  2. That is a very good argument. I wonder how big that market is, and how much penetration into it they think they can get?

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