Article first published as
New Apple Products But Where's the Revolution? on Technorati.
So today the buzz in Apple land was the
announcementof the new smaller IPad, the completely redesigned IMac and Retina display
on a 13 inch laptop. Oh yeah, and your
"New" Ipad is now old because the
4th
Generation IPAD was announced. The 4th gen IPad boasts a more powerful A6X
processor and available LTE connectivity.
Hope you got your offer from Gazelle.com locked in before today!
Tim Cook was front and center hyping all the
"innovations" of
his new products. At one point even
comparing the new IPAD mini to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Cook even went so far as to drag out the
"sold more IPad's than PC's" argument from last year which still holds as much
relevance as the number of paper clips consumed by the average office.
Undoubtedly there'll be hundreds of articles about the
announcement and it's not my intent to rehash that information. I'm sure there'll be 100 blog posts in the
next 24 hours to take care of that.
What was striking was how little innovation there was to be
had.
Sure, ever since the introduction of Samsung's Galaxy note
last year then the Nexus this year Apple fans have been hoping for a smaller
version of the IPad,
Today they got it but
it's hard to understand what's so great about it. It amounts to little more than Apple late to
a market already dominated by a competitor.
The new IMac has a
thinner profile and is available with the "new" fusion drive which is
little more than an SSD accelerated hard disk.
That's technology that's been
available since the
introduction of the Intel Z77 chipset. Unless
you view your IMac as an objet d'art instead of a computer there's nothing
revolutionary about it.
In short, today's Apple announcement boiled down to a
refresh of the current Ipad, a smaller Ipad with a $329 entry level price point
and a prettier IMac in 21.5 and 27" screen sizes.
Where's the real innovation? Where's the world changing
product that has set the standard for consumer electronics? Instead of changing the way we interact with
technology like the first Macintosh PC or the Iphone, Apple seems content to
react to market trends instead of setting them.
One thing that hasn't changed is the price point. Apple still demands a premium price for
largely garden variety hardware in an attractive shell.