Why you should buy an iPad or tablet

There is an old saying that you should not buy version 1 of anything. Products are rarely perfect when they are first launched and it often takes several generations of improvements before they become really good and worth having. The original product, whether it is hardware or software, computer related or otherwise, often has flaws or limitations and the people that buy these early versions are really just acting as guinea pigs. They try the product in real world situations, discover the problems, and help manufacturers to iron out the bugs. Subsequent versions are much improved. So with the Apple iPad, HP Slate and other tablet computers about to be launched, should you buy one, given that they are version 1? Yes and here's why.

I didn't like the original iPod and I didn't buy one. However, by the time it had reached version 3, it was a great music player and it had all the features and functions I desired in an MP3 player. I went out and bought one. The iPhone didn't look that impressive on launch day, but after some useful hardware improvements, such as a faster processor and better camera, and app developers had written a huge number of great apps, the 3GS is now a fantastic mobile phone/pocket computer/gaming device.

The thing is, what would have happened if no-one bought the original iPod or iPhone, or version 1 of any other hardware or software product? With poor sales, the manufacturer might have concluded that there wasn't a market for it and they might have abandoned development. Those enthusiastic early adopters who buy brand new products as soon as they come out provide the encouragement that companies need to go on to develop their not-quite-perfect products into great ones that everyone can enjoy.

The Apple iPad, HP Slate, and other tablet devices that are coming out this year are not perfect and they have lots flaws. However, buying them will encourage the manufacturers to improve their products and create even better ones. This version of the iPad isn't going to revolutionise the world as some people are predicting because it has too many limitations, but future versions just might and all the company needs is a bit of encouragement to improve it.

Of course, this presents a dilemma. Should you buy a product that's not perfect or wait until it is perfected? That's a tough decision.

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Will you buy a tablet/iPad or a laptop?

I was reading this Wired article about tablet computers and the future of computing and it got me thinking. It's an interesting article in which 13 technology experts give their thoughts about the tablet computer. It's not specifically about the Apple iPad, but it includes the iPad because that's a tablet computer and it'll probably be one of the market leaders.

The article tries to predict what we'll all be doing in a few years time and it talks about how tablets will replace laptops, gaming consoles and other devices and will become the main way in which we consume media and interact with computers. You should take everything with a hefty dose of salt because the future often unfolds in unpredictable ways. Go back 10, 20 or 30 years and look at people's predictions of the future and invariably they have turned out to be wrong.

Maybe we'll all be using tablet computers, but maybe we won't. Will the iPad dominate the market? Perhaps, but it's not a certainty and there are going to be lots of competitors. The HP Slate looks good and the YouTube video demo is impressive, mainly because of Flash, which the iPad doesn't support. That's just one competitor and there are many more.

Companies like Apple with its iPad and perhaps the other tablet makers too, want us all to buy tablet computers in addition to the devices we already have. However, instead of creating a new market, the tablet will probably split existing markets. You won't buy a tablet computer like an iPad or HP Slate as well as everything else you have, but instead of something you already own. For example, some people will decide that they don't need a laptop and instead a tablet does everything they need in a smaller, lighter, more portable package. Some people might decide that they don't need a smartphone and instead they can buy a cheap mobile that does calls and text and use a tablet for email, web, games, video and so on. Some people will decide that they don't need a top of the range music player and they'll get a tablet for web, video, games, and mail, and carry a small, simple and cheap MP3 player when they need to travel light.

In the future then, I don't think we'll have any more devices than we have now, but we might have a different mixture of devices. A tablet instead of a laptop, a simple phone and tablet instead of a smartphone, a basic MP3 player plus tablet, and so on.

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OS X's interface needs changing

One of the features of OS X on Apple computers is that the menu for an application is always displayed at the top of the screen. The menu bar is one of the unique features of OS X and no matter what application you run, the menu appears in the top left corner. It's time for a change.

The Windows and Linux way of displaying an application's menu is to place it at the top of the application's window. It makes much more sense. Now you might say that I'm just a Windows user and not used to the ways of the Mac, but I use Macs a lot and this is being typed into a Mac right now.

The problem with Apple's way of doing things is that the size of the computer screen has grown over the years. Having the menu in the top left corner works when the screen is small, as they have been in the past with previous Macs. It also works well if you have a MacBook and with a 13in or 15in screen the application and the menu are never very far apart.

But what about the 27in iMac? You can have an application in the bottom right corner of the screen and the menu for it is in the top left corner. That can be literally two feet away, or over half a metre in metric terms! When you can measure the distance between an application and its menus in feet, the time has come for a change. How big will the next iMac be, 32in, 36in? Who knows? The situation is just going to get worse, so come on Apple, it's time you ditched the menu bar.

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What do headlines really mean?

Here's a headline I read today, "February Mac sales up 43%." It sounds fantastic doesn't it? It sounds like Apple is doing really well and is taking over the world with more and more people switching from Windows PCs to MacBooks and iMacs. Here's another headline from today's news, "40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone." Another brilliant result for Apple and a kick in the teeth for Blackberry. However, what do these headlines really mean? Actually, they mean very little unless you dig really deeply into the background.

Take the first headline for example. Sales are up 43%. Unless you know how many sales have been made and what the total size of the market is, the headline means nothing. If I set up a computer store and sell two computers this year and three next year, the sales growth will be 50%. I could claim to have one of the fastest, perhaps the fastest, growing computer businesses in the market. But three sales against the million that are sold each year is nothing.

That's a silly example, of course, but consider this, company X selling 10 million computers a year would have to sell another 1 million to achieve 10% growth, but company Y selling 2 million a year would only have to sell another 200,000. When you're a small company it is easier to achieve big percentage sales growth. If company X sold another 500,000 their sales growth would be the less unimpressive sounding 5%. It would actually have sold more computers and increased sales by a bigger volume, but the 5% sales growth sounds poorer than the 10% achieved by the smaller company. Of course, 10% growth is brilliant for the company, but in terms of the size of the market, it may not be so impressive.

Let's look at the second headline, "40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone." Now suppose the headline said "40% of Ford owners willing to trade in for a Ferrari." I have no doubt they would, but what car will they actually buy next time around? Yes, another Ford. They might desire a Ferrari, but they need something cheaper and more practical, so they get a Ford. I bought a new computer at Christmas. I would have loved to have traded it in for a Mac, but instead I got a Windows PC. A desire to own something doesn't always translate into a sale. And the results of polls and surveys can be skewed by the questions being asked too.

The point I'm making here is that you should always think carefully when you read headlines, see statistics, sales figures, results of surveys and so on. They don't always mean what you think they mean.

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Select your web browser - too much choice?

Microsoft has been forced to display a web browser choice screen in Windows in the EU. You can see the screen here and there are 12 browsers to choose from, including Internet Explorer 8.

Several of the alternative web browser makers are unhappy and the reason is that they are off the screen and so cannot be seen unless the scroll bar is used to drag them into view. It's not clear why Microsoft would use this tiny window to display just five at a time when the screen is easily large enough to display all 12. If you reload the page you'll see that their positions are random, but the first five are always the same, just in a different order. They are the five most popular, but a benefit to Microsoft is that it looks like it's only competing against another four.

What's puzzling is why this has been forced onto Microsoft. Surely you can't have one set of rules for one company and another set for everyone else. It doesn't make sense and it just isn't fair. Why should Microsoft be forced to display this web browser choice screen and not Apple? Shouldn't Apple be forced to offer Safari, Camino, Chrome, Firefox and others? Why does every Linux distro come with Firefox? Where's the browser choice screen in Linux? The only operating system that is forced to provide a choice is Microsoft and that's wrong. The same rules should apply to everyone.

Perhaps we'll see an OS choice screen pop up on new PCs and Microsoft will be forced to display download links for Linux distros. That would be crazy, but so is the browser choice screen. Most people know they have a choice of browsers and are quite capable of downloading alternatives. After all, they are free.

It's Microsoft's OS and it should be able to bundle whatever software it wants with it, just as Apple does and Linux distros do. Besides, the browser choice screen is not needed because people are leaving Internet Explorer for better alternatives anyway and market share is declining steadily. We don't need browser choice screens. We're not stupid and when a better browser comes along we'll switch anyway. It's already happening.

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Publishers try to defend high ebook prices

The price of ebooks is rising. Amazon tried to fix the price at just under $10, but publishers weren't happy with this arrangement and when the Apple iPad was launched in January, they took the opportunity to put pressure on Amazon to raise its prices. It looks like ebooks will typically be priced at around $13-$15 and they broke down the costs involved with ebooks and traditional paper books in a recent New York Times article. They said that people have unrealistic expectations of how low the price of ebooks should be. However, the figures they present, which show that there's little difference in profit between ebooks and paper books, are all wrong.

One problem is that they use the list price of a hardback book for their figures. Online stores like Amazon discount books quite heavily and even high street stores have offers of 'buy one get the other half price' and so on. Does anyone really pay the list price for books? You can easily get 25% off the list price of a popular book and this makes the publishers' claimed cost figures all wrong.

Another problem is that if you buy a paper book then it is a physical item that can be legally passed on and sold. I can buy a book, read it, then lend it to someone else to read. This is a lost sale for the publisher. I can also sell a book on eBay and recover some of the original purchase price. So I get 25% discount when I buy the book off Amazon, I then sell it for 25% on eBay, so the cost to me is about half the original list price. What's more, when I sell it to someone else, I get the money and the publisher gets nothing. It's another lost sale.

I can also borrow the book from a public library for free. It's another lost sale.

There are lots of hidden costs with traditional paper books that you don't get with ebooks. You can't sell your ebook on eBay, you can't lend it to someone else, and it's not in a public library. Therefore an ebook sale is actually more valuable to a publisher than a paper book sale. They could probably price ebooks at one quarter of the price of a hardback paper book and still make more profit. But will they? It's unlikely.

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