The iPad: Shareholder’s Dream Device

T’was the night before the Apple Special Event and hearts everywhere were flittering with excitement. Rumor had it that Apple would present a tablet computer as its newest product and come January 27th, rumor was right. Unfortunately, to techie dismay Steve Jobs and the Apple brains seem to have fallen short of all expectations. Maybe it was the rampant rumors, or the undeniably high bar Apple raised with the iPhone, but everyone seems to agree; the iPad is a less than exciting.

Apple has become very keen on creating beautiful, sleek and sexy Money Sucking Devices. Everything about the iPad screams “Pay me!”. The whole experience is designed to funnel more traffic to the iTunes store. Lets see:

• The OS
Tons of people were hoping the tablet would come with Snow Leopard, but instead the iPad comes with a modified iPhone OS. Why? So you can buy more apps from the App Store. If Snow Leopard would’ve been the OS, Apple wouldn’t get 30% of every application I would purchase and install on the device.

• No Flash
As was painfully clear during the presentation (I cringed at the missing plugin icon when Steve was browsing the Times site), there will be no Flash Player on this device. And why would there be? With Flash, you could do such things as play games, watch TV shows on Hulu, movies on Nextflix Watch Instantly, etc… . All of them things that Apple sells you. Who would buy the latest episode of Lost, if they could just watch it for free on Hulu?

• Stores
iTunes, App, Book. This is the core purpose of this device. All the extras the device comes with (browser, email, other free apps) are the bait. Before you know it, you’ll be buying some app, video, music or book. Everything that is missing on this device can be traced to one of these stores. Apple wants to control what you do on this device so you won’t go around consuming content they can’t charge you for.

From a business point of view, it’s brilliant, and I should think about buying some stocks, but my inner geek is crying. Despite all the short comings the device is sleek, and if you don’t mind falling into their model, I’m sure it will serve many many people well. Me? I’ll probably wait until it’s Jailbroken.

Guest article from: Alex Stanciu