New study says fewer people thinking of buying an iPad now that they actually know what it is
Retrevo, everyone’s favorite tech polling site, has published a comparison between its customer’s desire to buy an Apple tablet both pre- and post iPad keynote. The results show a marked decrease in interest in the new Apple product, with half of all respondents now saying they have NO desire to buy an iPad, down from 26% before the announcement.
I kind of find this poll interesting in that I had the exact OPPOSITE reaction to the iPad unveiling. For years I had said I would never want to buy an Apple tablet, but each day I find I am more and more interested in buy an iPad. Why? Because it ISN’T an Apple tablet.
Sitting here typing on my MacBook Pro while watching the Super Bowl, I can’t imagine sitting in the same position and typing as easily on a tablet. Sure, tablets look great for reading eBooks and webpages, but for actual computing tasks they would suck. I would have to have my knees raised an extra 15-20 degrees, and my arms bent in, uncomfortably close to my body in order to type, and I would have to give up my ability to have my screen tilted to a comfortable viewing angle. But aside from typing, I primarily use my laptop for editing photos in iPhoto, editing video in Final Cut, and creating Photoshop, After Effects, or Flash graphics, none of which I would want to do on a 10-inch touch screen.
What I WOULD want to do would be surf the web, e-mail, play games, and watch SlingBox and (hopefully) Netflix content on it. It also might be a cool way to control Airtunes and the Apple TV. But I was never looking to replace my laptop or tower with a tablet. The idea that carrying a 5lb computer is such a chore over carrying a 1 lb computer has always seemed ridiculous to me. You would still buy a bag for it, likely with a shoulder strap. Unless you walk more than 2 miles while carrying your laptop each day, you’re not going to convince me that carrying a MacBook Pro is a burden vs an iPad.
Sure, I don’t NEED an iPad – no one who owns an iPhone and MacBook DOES– but it isn’t as hard to justify buying decision as a true Apple Tablet would have been.
Very good point, the more I think of the iPad the more I see it as an intermediary, not something to replace either my MacBook Pro or my iPhone. I can personally see myself using it to present my lectures. It would be nicer than carrying the MacBook Pro back and forth each time; a particular pain since I need to disconnect my external hard drive and other cables each time.
I hear what you are saying. The problem is, I own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. I don’t need an iPad. 630 bucks (would anyone buy this without 3G?), although reasonable, is more money than I am willing to spend on something I absolutely don’t need. Giving another 30 bucks a month to ATT and their horrible service is not an option.
The fact that it is touch screen is cool, but that is it. A MacBook and iPhone are much more functional. What the iPad needed was a platform somewhere in between OS X and iPhone OS.
By necessity, the App store needs to be in affect. Downloading and installing software on a mobile phone would be a pain. However, everyone hates the App store. I can’t imagine all the good software that will never be because of Apple’s tyrannic App Store policy – that makes Microsoft look like a saint.. You can bet you will never see Netflix on an iPad.
This is another failed moment by Jobs. Just like the Apple TV. Jobs could have had the home entertainment market. Why didn’t he just ship them with Netflix and Hulu on them? iTunes… Apple’s biggest strength, Apple’s biggest weakness.
And if this tablet takes off, it will be the beginning of the end for the open source community. Developers will have no freedom. Apple will decide all new software with an iron fist. All the things that make OS X great will be undone. Our only hope would be that Ballmer would break his neck and Bill Gates would come back to Microsoft and save us from Apple. OMG what a horrible future!!!!!
Sorry for my rant, but the iPad SUCKS!!!
@ Micah – i think the argument that it’s difficult to pass apps through the app store has shown to be FUD. 140,000 apps and 90% approval doesn’t show any slow down in development. web browsers are available on the iPhone, and the recent revelation that slingbox was never approached by at&t to access 3G functions just makes the argument seem more and more invalid. and if people did want to buy based on open source ideologies then we would all be running linux right now.
we have to see where the market takes this. right now, this thing might wind up being aimed to take control of the eBook reader market. show people that this is the best solution to publishing. think about – you could get marvel or DC comics automatically download like podcasts…
i do agree with you that the iPad might be a dud. sometimes i wish this thing was never developed. but i’m glad Apple put it’s hat in the ring. if it doesn’t sell, then Apple might lower the price of the MacBook Air!
Fact is that all these “The iPad is THE next step in the evolution of computers” mainstream articles all over the world see it as a replacement for PCs/notebooks. And I am convinced that tablets will be the standard personal computers in 10-15 years. But the iPad is just a big iPod Touch and not the first step in this direction. Apple should have developed their touch software on basis of Mac OS X and found a cool way to make existing Mac software touch controllable. THAT would have been the first step to the Star Trek TNG future with tablets. At least I hope they will come up soon with a new MacBook Pro to shut up the “iPad will be the end of the software business model as we know it” voices.
As with any survey this data can be interpreted in different ways to suit the point of view of the person using it. It shows after the announcement 3x as many people sampled would definitely like to buy an iPad – good news for Apple. Also the shift from 26% to 52% is a little misleading as up to 17% of this is made up by the people indicated by the blue section in the left hand chart. i.e. people who hadn’t heard of it and weren’t interested, who after the keynote became people who had heard of it and still weren’t interested.
I’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again. My mother called me after seeing it on the news and asked me when it was coming out because she wanted one. Now though we bought a MacBook a couple of years ago, she only currently uses it to read email, browser the web etc; exactly the features offered by the new iPad.
This product is perfect for the 50 something or other market, who don’t or didn’t use computers in their day to day work (yes lots of people still don’t) and just want something that’s easy to use and doesn’t require them to phone their children frequently to ask for help.
These are also people who tend not to answer tech polls. So I think this product is going to go down a storm in the real world, although many techy people like myself aren’t that impressed. One aside to this, if they’d added a camera for skype etc, it’d of really been a killer purchase for my mother.
“Yes, and I think I would like to buy one” goes up from 3% to 9%. How can this be interpreted as “fewer people thinking of buying an iPad “?
I wasn’t that impressed after the keynote, but I’m more interested in it now. I think there are some good markets for it. Aside from typical consumers, students are a great potential market and mobile workers (i.e., insurance adjusters). A lot of workers need to use email, word processing and a access a corporate database. You can do all of that with the iPad. As I already have an iMac, an MBP and an iPhone, I really want the camera (for videoconferencing) and Netflix capability before I invest in an iPad. For me, iPad that does all of that, coupled with downloadable newspaper subscriptions and its eBook reader could make it a “must have” device for me.
My parents, who don’t have any desire to use a computer, are interested in an iPad, but the 80+ demographic isn’t a real growth market (with a few significant advances in medical nanotechnology, maybe it will be).
I could see this form factor becoming dominant with a few caveats. I couldn’t do any real programming work on an iPad display. I use dual 24″ monitors now. There’s no way I could switch to a single 1024 x 768 display. If the iPad could act as a full screen keyboard and work with wireless displays and storage when on my desk, well, I might buy two.
@darrel 140,000 Apps and 35% of them are high-tech whoopee cushions.
Slingplayer isn’t a threat to Apple, only one affected by this is ATT. 90% approval rate, LOL!!! How many apps were never developed to begin with? A company won’t make an investment if the product won’t be approved. How many programs sell you music (not from iTunes) on the iPhone? Why isn’t their an app to purchase music from Amazon or Walmart? These would be great features/apps.
If you bought a Mac, then you did buy your computer based on open source ideology. All of the programming languages are open source which appeals to developers. If you are using a closed source app that you paid for on your Mac, then you are using open source technology.
@Peter Neal you are exactly right, and that is why the product is so scary. The average computer user, checks email, maybe does some word processing. Power users obviously can’t afford to make iPad there main platform. But the millions of people that only own a computer to facebook can have a computer, that is virtually maintenance free and serves all their needs for very little money. It is even wireless EVERYWHERE.
I am not normally opposed to change, but I can imagine one of these being in almost every home. This is not the iron clad nazi future that computer users need. I love Apple for it’s strong points, but this is a major blow to computing as we know it.
@darrel Forgot to mention, when you use your Mac, you basically are running linux! Just has a much nicer User Interface. Let’s not get into the discussion of Micro-Kernals vs. the Monolithic kernal used in Linux. I am talking about the Unix environment. Bash is the default shell for God’s sake, and although bash is not Linux, Bash would not be without linux.
While I do see your point my reason for holding out is simple. No Camera. I’m not big into iChat or Skype by a tablet device that would allow for me to surf the web easily, check my email and have simple video conferencing would change to becoming my primary means of communications at home and in the office. I would also use it in the field to take simple notes on jobs and look up information in the company online databased while taking photos of things to send info back to the office. These are things the iPhone is just too small to do effectively. Taking my laptop (17″ MBP) would be too much of a hassle. While you can use the camera for photos its too tough to orient, it weighs a ton more, and I don’t need a full keyboard in the field. So if it had a camera I could see the iPad being the perfect intermediary, until then, while I want one for techlusts sake, I won’t be getting one until there is a camera.
No 16:9, no multitasking, no handwriting recognition, no flash, no camera,..Oh and did I say no handwriting recognition! I wanted to take this thing to class & use it to take notes & scribble formulas (windows tablets can do this but the “iPad” does not!?!?) Steve what the hell were you thinking! Mr Jobs you could have made this thing so totally awesome, (light years ahead of anything currently out there) instead you have given us this big steaming pile! The ipad sucks period! Perfectly put, and well said:-)
What was Steve Jobs thinking when he put this thing out!? I thought for sure it would (at the very least) have all of the features that their old defunct Newton device had but alas it does not. That thing (the Newton) has more functionality and is more capable of filling the roll I just outlined above.
The tablet space that we all thought they would enter has a clearly defined set of functionalities this is precisely the reason that everyone was so disappointed with the iPad. It had NONE of those features.
Think about it, if Apple had just come out and said they were developing an advanced ereader like nothing else you’ve ever seen, we would have been impressed, but to say this whole time they were developing a tablet, and then show this? They killed their own hype by claiming this device was something it wasn’t.
You can’t just come into a space that has been in existence for over 10 years now, say you have something to add to it, then change the definition of the space to fit your device.
A tablet has been, is, and always will be a device that is a fully functional notebook you can write on. It should be a notepad replacement. It CAN be a convertible laptop, OR a slate type device, but it needs to be a fully functional computer to fit the definition. Even a netbook is a fully functional computer at it’s heart.
The iPad is a big iPod touch…not even an iPhone. And it HARDLY fills the space they claimed it would.
Even Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field couldn’t help him this time.
You are all missing the point …
Just as a gaming platform it is an instant hit … there is nothing like it !!
It is a bigger iPod Touch, and that is what gamers want.
And for just $100 more than the Touch … it is a steal.
I know in my house we will be buying several iPads, and my kid’s friends all want one.
As far as being a computer replacement … Well … it is NOT. Nor is the PSP, the iPod Touch, the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader or any of those devices that the iPad will replace.
@12.
Fail. Sounds like the same FUD used for iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iTunes app store.