Apple is brilliant because it gets people to pay more to get less. I buy the idea that weight is important. I just doubt people will value four-tenths of a pound more than an SD slot, USB port, magnetic charging or fast-charge battery. Add to this the significant premium you pay for an iPad over its competitors with a similar configuration, and it just doesn't seem to be a good value.
Apple
fans generally have a cow when I write about things left out of an Apple
product, because to them, anything Apple brings out is perfect and to suggest
otherwise is heretical. Given that I think fanboys give up their intellectual
freedom to the vendor or product they religiously follow, I tend to wear the
Apple Heretic badge with honor -- and thus I'm going to point out the
technologies the Microsoft Surface 2 and Nokia 2520 products have that the new
iPad Air lacks.
I'm not arguing
that loyal Apple fans will switch, but I am suggesting that Apple no longer
owns the gold standard for tablets. In fact, I doubt any one vendor owns it
today, which means you get a lot more choice -- and, if you aren't joined at
the hip to Apple, you'll likely find a more useful product from another vendor.
I'll close with my
product of the week: my new favorite 7-inch tablet, the Amazon Kindle HDX.
The Apple Air
Let's set the scale
and talk about the Apple Air for a moment. For this refresh, Apple basically
put the iPad on a diet and cut about four-tenths of a pound off its 1.4 lb.
tablet. This is significant, but I didn't hear anyone really complaining that
the 1.4-lb. device was too heavy. The iPad was already one of the more fragile
tablets, and making it even thinner will increase the risk of breakage
significantly. Granted, it is beautiful to look at, but tablets and smartphones
are dropped.
The tablet got the
power it needed to run the new OS, and this is likely the strongest reason to
replace your old iPad with a new one, as folks have complained that loading the
new OS on any of the previous versions of Apple's tablets or smartphones will cause
them to feel significantly slower. The Apple tablets are pure tablets, as Tim
Cook pointed out. You can add a Bluetooth keyboard, but iPads are designed to
be held and really don't do that well as a laptop alternative.
This is by design,
because Apple wants its customers to buy a MacBook as well, so it can get the
added profit, and this has been a very profitable strategy. So, moving from
Apple to a product that is more dual-role potentially could provide you not
only with a small savings over the premium iPad price, but also -- depending on
how you work -- possibly save you the cost of a US$1,000 laptop.
