The "Disappointing" iPad 3
Marco Arment, writing about speculation that the iPad 3 will be disappointing, even before anyone has seen it:
Knowing no more than you do right now, I can guarantee you: the iPad 3 will disappoint a lot of armchair tech commentators, “analysts”, and anyone who gets paid by the pageview. (How convenient.)
We see this “disappointing” talk from many of the old-timers because they’ve spent 25 years writing about specs and that’s the lens they use to look at the iPad. “It’s not getting a quad-core processor? Android tablets have quad-core chips. How disappointing.”
They don’t care that Apple and third parties ship software that utilizes both cores (iMovie, GarageBand) and that hardly anyone ships Android software that utilizes more than one core, much less all four. They don’t care that Apple may have tweaked last year’s dual-core chip to get better performance and better battery life. According to them, since 2=2 and 2 < 4, the iPad 2 is a lackluster upgrade and is empirically worse than an Android tablet.
Meanwhile, 50 million people couldn’t care less what’s inside an iPad. All that matters is that the hardware and software work together to make a delightful experience. Just look at what Om Malik wrote about giving his iPad 2 to his mother in India:
It didn’t matter how it was happening — just that she could talk to her grandson who was oceans apart from her. If there ever was a moment that captured the emotion in a piece technology, that was it. The look on her face made me realize how lucky I am to write about an industry that makes such things possible. I also thought to myself, maybe somewhere Steve Jobs is smiling too.
Like I said before: It’s not about what it is. It’s about what it does.