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iPad: a timid, luke-warm, defensive move from an Apple with no gonads

I have been using the iPad for two days, savoring its nuances and details. I will spare you the review (good reviews have been already written). Rather, I am going to share with my belief that Apple has been finally castrated by suits. Innovation is dead, long live good business. So much care has been put into making sure that the (increasingly stale) advantage Apple holds in packaging and integration is preserved and protected from cannibalization, that the iPad (and the company, and Jobs) have lost their balls.

Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. From the moment you start using the iPad, you become as aware of its wanders (the packaging, the minimalist interface, the user experience) as of its surgically removed potential, of its infuriating manipulated functional and hardware profile. It is cute, sleek and a pleasure to use. It’s also nothing like it could be, just a luke-warm projection of its potential.

But, what is it? Whatever it is, it stays away from threatening anything that Apple makes money on. Innovators are brave: the iPad is the creation of cowards.

As a phone, it fails because it doesn’t hold calls. As a media companion, the science-fiction thing that we all expected, it fails, because it excludes you from viewing 98% of all sites that hold that media, and it’s so obsessed with having you spend money in their store that its apps are manipulated as money grabs. As a computer, a 1980’s single-tasking OS will make you feel like if you were trying to type with boxing gloves on: another fail.

If you ask the castrati, I am sure they will love your assessment: the iPhone, the MacBooks, the iPods, can rest in their thrones, despite ever-shrinking innovation advantages. There, they can bask on the adoration of us, the fans, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years on Apple. “A master move!” The castrati sing praises to each other, the app vendors take advantage of the confusion to ask for absurd prices (like $140 for the NYT for a year… would you please share the stuff you are smoking with us, the people?), the pundits congratulate each other.

Mmm… My assessment is that the castration is not only bad for innovation. I believe Apple is bleeding from it, and less and less people cares to see it go. Including us, the fans. I can give you many reasons why this is the death of the Apple we used to love, but let me just give you the two less controversial ones.

Good money after bad

Why protect business that are increasingly indefensible? Why protect an already inferior iPhone, or a mostly undifferentiated laptop business? To castrate the iPad just so that it does not cannibalize MacBook Pros is absurd in many fronts (except the castrati’s next quarter spreadsheet):

• Other players that are very eager to try the tablet business don’t have to protect anything. Thus, they can afford to create the tablet that could really be. Small companies such as Google. And no, the 140,000 apps will be no defense: they were when they costed $0.99 and you could whim your way through a few hundred ones. Not so when they cost several times more than desktop equivalents, if you price them by functionality delivered.
• Protective anti-innovation is what you do when you are Microsoft. Well, everybody knows that Jobs always wanted to be Gates, I guess he has succeeded.
• The businesses Apple is protecting deserve to die. No? You disagree? Ah, I see, you love to lug that laptop around… Or to have to wait two minutes for it to boot. Or carrying a car battery hanging from your left leg so that it doesn’t die in the middle of the movie. Come on! The laptop has been dead for years: we keep it alive through a battle of patents and… yes, protective moves. It takes you ten minutes using iPad to realize that not only the laptop is dead, but the tablet is its next evolutionary step. But wait, it can’t, because Apple has removed its balls. The device made by cowards…

About the iPhone, let’s face it, not even worth the ink to argue that it has fallen behind, is it? I never liked Google much (just another face of a common oligopoly), but I like them more and more because the Android beats the iPhone so many times over… coming from a company that never built a device!!! Can’t wait to see the second iteration: in the meanwhile my AT&T contract will expire… Can’t wait

The innovation cycle is working against Apple, not in its favor

Despite popular belief, Apple’s advantage in its markets has stopped being innovation a long time ago, and it has been packaging all along. Apple may not own the multi-touch interface, its OS may be a minor variant of BSD, the graphics advantage over other OS’s evaporated over ten years ago, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t care, because its advantage is packaging of the right standard hardware and  functionality, at the right moment, with the correct marketing. Ounce per ounce, and dollar per dollar, a Sony Vaio or a Dell computer holds much more innovation than a Mac, and they do because they are much better at the margins game, not because they want to be good. But from the moment you open the box, “advantage Apple”.

How can Apple afford an integration-based advantage, when other companies can counterattack with lightening innovation cycles? Protective market manipulations is one way. Give you iPhone 3.0, which sucked really bad, until it couldn’t hold 4.0 (which sucked a little less) any longer, and then sold it back to you who has already paid for 3.0. By carefully manipulating its app marketplace (and the numbers: there is no such thing as even 70,000 apps if you remove the multiple apps instantiated through data segmentation – there is a soccer app that counts like 240 apps: because each soccer team has its own version– the apps that just don’t work, and those that flopped but obstinately remain around, and other tricks of the counting), Apple keeps the innovation trickle attractive, and leverages over and over our (the fans’) commitment.

Another way is mystique. What can I say, I hate to be censored by Apple, I hate to be milked over and over, by Apple and Friends alike, but what can I say, rather give Apple the money than give it to Microsoft… right? Well, not so right any more. Fans know they are being abused: even Jobs tells them so when he unwraps his gigantic ego in the next MacWorld and talks with zen (and medieval) zest about how the future is carefully planned and staged for them. The iPad may brake the balance for many of them. You mean that you don’t spend that extra 34 cents on a USB port just so that you can sell it to me for $29? Or that memory card reader, another awesome $0.65, so that … $29 AGAIN? You mean that I could REALLY work with this beauty, but you are going to wait to sell it to me as a non-upgradeable fix in the next version, and it will be just an OS multi-tasking unlock?

When fans feel abused, they start routing for the underdogs. Why do you think that the last SuperBowl was the most watched in history? Have you heard about the ultimate underdog, Google? Or ITC, who Apple is fending off through a miserable patent grinding lawsuit? Or that tiny company orders of magnitude larger than Apple called Nokia? These guys have no laptop to protect, no fans to abuse: they can only leverage their HUGE sizes and innovation pools…

Guess what: I can’t wait to see it happen. I wander what it would be like to be an ex-fan: it would be like leaving a disfunctional “family” once and for all, wouldn’t it?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  UPDATE (4/6/9)

I just read an article in Boing Boing that expresses my feelings about the iPad quite well, specially as they relate to how Apple assumes the user to be (a) slightly retarded and (b) happy to just consume. Highly recommended…

Kudos to Cory Doctorow

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– UPDATE (4/6/9)

Umar Haque (another great thinker of the Enterprise and Media 2.0 space), brings his great analytical skills to the fore in his analysis for HBR of how Apple is shooting itself on the iFace [sic] by trying to support the revolution of media as a service, *as well as* the financial benefits of last century’s product lock-in at the same time. Industrial revolution and services economy in the same drive… Great thinking from a very articulate and insightful observer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 8:49 pm and is filed under gadgetry, iPad, monopolies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.