Off the Wagon

Hillel Fuld:

This kind of cheap and inaccurate marketing on Apple’s part is to me a clear indication that it knows its tablet dominance is for the first time, being threatened. 

It knows the iPad Mini cannot compete with the competition if you take all factors that matter including performance, graphics, and price into account, and it planned this launch accordingly...

I hate to say it again and state the obvious but this kind of product launch and cheap marketing tactic would never have happened if a certain someone was still running this company. Low, Apple. Very low.

Now, in terms of disclosure, I have a Galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I'm obviously well immersed in the Android ecosystem. That said, I want to jump down Mr. Fuld's throat here.
Predicting the future is pretty hard. Predicting what products people will gobble up is pretty hard too. Steve Jobs was pretty good at both. Which made him a rare man.

But in addition to the rare combined skill of prescience and intuition, Jobs had one other skill: the sell. When the iPhone 4 came out, its specs weren't that amazing. Off the top of my head I could think of three different Android phones that had hardware that matched or exceeded the iPhone. When the iPad 2 came out, it met (but didn't exceed) the specs of its Android competitors. But Jobs could sell anything, as long as it looked great and was part of the Apple ecosystem.
And that's the key here. the iPad Mini is indeed, as Mr. Fuld rants, a sub-par piece of hardware. But it's part of the Apple ecosystem. My friend Josh likes to read books on his iPad, then switch to his iPhone. Something I don't understand makes it so whatever page he's on consistent across both devices. Pretty neat. There are a million things like this in the Apple ecosystem. The iPad Mini gets that. It gets iTunes and iCloud and iWhateverElse. The Nexus 7 certainly wins the hardware battle. But the iPad Mini gets a software leg up.

Was it disingenuous for Schiller and Cook to compare the two tablets and declare the iPad Mini "better"? Perhaps. But not because it isn't. Just because they said it was better for the wrong reasons. The iPad Mini isn't a more powerful tablet than Google's Nexus 7. It's power comes from its software, which continues to be unrivaled in the Android ecosystem. Trust me, I know.

Jobs sold equal-or-less-than hardware for the last 5 years of his life. Get over it.


_