Apple: Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Buy an iPad

Can't believe I watched the entire Super Bowl and not one Apple ad...did I miss one?? Thought for sure we would see the first hip, trendy, iPad ad convincing us that all the young people are buying one so you should too!

This post was mentioned on Twitter by thurrott: Apple: Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Buy an iPad: Following news that I was right about Apple's decision to not... http://bit.ly/dlSAJi

@ kadarzsolt Microsoft enthusiasts are likely to pay an artificially inflated price for an OS that introduces features that have been available on OSX for many years. Remember the 400$ dollar Windows Vista or Windows 7?

Dear Paul, on behalf of the millions of Lemmings who enjoy Apple products i would like to thank you for your persisting (and many times touching) interest for our wallets. However i would like to note that i am a proud and enormously happy owner of an iMac, an iPod, an iPhone and do not intend to follow your advice for not buying (under any circumstances) the iPad. I will not follow it because it will allow me to enjoy 95% of the activities i am currently doing in my desk, from the comfort of my bed, couch, armchair, car. We Lemmings dont always follow logic. In fact, most of the time we follow our heart. Look at me straight in my happy digital eyes and confess. Are all of the purchases you do followed after complicated analysis' and mathematics.? Do you ever tell a friend who owns a Ford Mustang that this was an insane purchase cause the price is high and propose him to wait till prices drop? Of course not!! I will buy this insanely beautiful and useful (for me) iPad like a teenager meets his girlfriend in front of a cinema on a Saturday night no matter how much the ticket costs.

A company trying to open up a new market for themselves by being flexible on pricing. The horror!

In another meeting, Steve Balmer threw a chair at what turned out to be his own shadow.

Yeah, wait for some Microsoft vaporware thing instead. It might be like Zune, or WinCE, or run Windows 7, or all three, and it'll definitely have an app store, or music rentals, in the US, anyway. Multitouch definitely, and it might run Office, if you transfer the font team to them. Can't wait!

This is true of practically all products. For a guy who has not touched one of these, and who will have one in his hands on launch day, he really does want this to fail.

Actually the most surprising thing here is not the pricing drop. We all know that's going to happen, it's just a matter of when. The surprising thing is that this candidness would be leaked. It would seem to me that Shope will no longer be in any meetings with Apple executives. In other news, there is more than one executive at Apple? I thought it would be all jobs at the top of the org chart, then everyone else.

Today in my email an offer from Amazon..... Windows 7 Secrets by Paul Thurrott, 47% off. Paul you are being very nimble with your pricing...or the demand must be really low???

the degree of fantical brand loyalty, no matter what side of the fence you're on is simply astonishing. It's a product people!!! This product doesn't measure up in any way shape or form to other products in this category, accept it and move on. The fact that you enjoy apple products or dell products, doesn't mean you have to purchase every single product they sell.. I own a dell laptop, my second one to be exact. The reason I bought the second one is the first one was getting long in the tooth and it needed to be replaced. The first laptop provided me terrific service (6 years and counting without reinstalling the OS) and zero hardware issues. That said, I don't own a dell desktop, went with a home built soluiton instead, I don't own any of their monitors, or other products although they have pretty good ratings.. I'm in no way a dell loyalist, I buy products that meet my needs for the price I'm willing to pay. If dell produced a stinker laptop, and I had the misfortune of buying one, I'd probably try another manufacturer. I'll bet that some of the customers that bought apple's 27" imac aren't going to be jumping at buying yet another apple experiment.

Dear Paul, Why are you so obsessed with Apple? Are you really a fanboy but are afraid of getting found out? Get a life, and do what you are best at - Microsoft bashing!

but King Lemming Thurrott, you're buying one! Probably going to go there on opening day and stand in line with the other lemmings. Hypocrite.

"Get a life, and do what you are best at - Microsoft bashing!" Telling people to get a life over the internet. Classic. Anyway, Paul's essentially giving the thing more free publicity, really. But also, I laugh at the brand loyalty. As a consumer, I'll take from whatever company, so to speak.

An interesting point raised earlier: if you're a "lemming" because you buy a product the moment it's ready, then that would be disastrous for Microsoft: Never, ever buy a Zune until a few months after it's out -- Microsoft often cuts the price a few months later, before it's even close to being replaced (that happened with the Zune HD just this past week). Never buy a Windows PC or Windows Mobile phone simply because you need or want it. Ever. You are only allowed to wait until it's in the clearance bin at Best Buy or Verizon. If you bought an Xbox 360 when it launched in late 2005, you're just a shameless Microsoft lemming who will buy anything Steve Ballmer asks you to buy. Of course, I don't believe those statements. Why? Because companies are allowed to show discretion with pricing, especially when they're entering into relatively new product categories like Apple is with the iPad. The notion that one must not even hint that prices will ever change is naive, if not hypocritical given how often Microsoft and its partners will run sales and price drops.

Paul is absolutely correct on this one. After all, didn't Microsoft just lower the price of the Zune HD since nobody bought that? :)

If the iPad had a front camera- I'd buy it regardless. This would had been perfect for Skype calls. --------------- How many homes have you gone into that has an AT&T video phone as proposed in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. I have never seen one. Why, because people don't want to sit down in front of a screen to talk on the phone. So the iPad not having a camera says nobody wants a video phone so why would you want that capability? Great for podcasts on TwitTV but not for talking to someone in your bathrobe.

In last Friday's Windows Weekly Paul prettty much ripped Microsoft a new one based on Brass's article in the NYT. Paul likes to point out everyone who does not think like him.

Ha, ha. They're practically telling people to wait until they lower prices and then to buy it. I can't believe they would put out something like this... @ chipwinter: No company really knows it will succeed with a product. Most companies don't even expect to have a huge success, and they don't announce that they're unsure about it. And if they would announce that, they're basically lowering the probability of success. Come on, few people are going to buy something announced as "unsure about whether anyone will want it". But, come on, I'm sure that it will have at least mediocre success, if not more. What is cool about this thing, and what I think to be one of few keys to Apple's success, is that it puts out a simple choice for average, non-techy people out there. Instead of having to sift through the buttload of usually mediocre, variably priced tablets, netbooks, and smartbooks, one has the option to settle for a hyped-up, well-known choice that has probably all the features he'll need (believe it or not, iWork is actually a decent MS Office replacement; plus here it has a bunch of touch UI niceties that the overpopulated MS Office ribbon with some tiny icons can't really compete with).

aggressively lower prices when it doesn't take off in the marketplace...... http://www.amazon.com/Windows-7-Secrets-Paul-Thurrott/dp/0470508418/ref=... Price: $26.49 You Save: $23.50 (47%) I would say that is aggressive. Hurry before they run out!!

"Microsoft is a dying company that only makes money from Office (soon to become obsolete) and Windows (also soon to become obsolote) contracts with businesses and those contracts will expire" I was in a Cisco UCS server class recently in a large city on the west coast. The class was packed. Everyone buying that expensive hardware was buying it to run VMware or XenServer on. NO ONE was going to use Hyper V, and almost everyone in the class that had laptops with them were running Mac's or Linux. No one was buying these things to run Windows straight on the hardware, hyper V or not. The times are a changing.

@BladRnr"There is zero innovation coming out of Redmond that actually benefits average people who aren't Windows geeks. Zero." Not taking sides, but I have to disagree here. Being a Mac user and even a Mac OS X user, I have to say that MS has some cool stuff going on too. I don't mean the ribbon -- here I actually prefer (parts of) the UIs that are in iWork (the touch UI looks very intuitive and cool, by the way) or even OpenOffice.org. But look at Windows -- the aero snap feature is very user-friendly (in fact, I've put a similar feature on Mac OS, although shortcut-triggered), window maximization allows one to work on one thing without unnecessary distractions (Google Chrome OS takes this a step further), aero-flip (much quicker and better-managed than Exposé), the squiggles under spelling and grammar errors (at least I think that was them), the taskbar, ..... Now, I know that's not that much, and there really isn't anything new and exciting (it's always either, but not both) coming from MS today. "Say what you want about the iPad. Keeping telling the 50 or so people here just how awful Apple is, and how we should all be computing like it's 1995, and Windows rulez the world with massive market share, and just wait long enough and MSFT will have something better. It's just lip service at end of the day." I don't think Paul necessarily always criticizes Apple. I just think he's sometimes so fed up with the over-whelming puffery about Apple that comes out of almost any media source that he feels like he should lower the excitement to a more rational level. With MS developments, on the other hand, there's not much excitement, so he tries to talk up every glimmer of hope (like Windows Mobile 7). With the iPad, Paul rightly feels that things like this exist already, and that better things with more capabilities exist already. However, he forgets that none of those have the at-first-sight appeal that iPad or the same kind of attention it gets (you're always likelier to buy a product you can remember a name of, and it's easier to remember the single iPad, which sticks to the product over the years, than the countless gibberish names other computer companies come up with) or the same kind of touch friendliness (after all, all apps for the iPad have been built to be touched; you can't say that about Windows apps, which tend to have tiny menus and buttons that are hard to push with fingers). "The iPad is the future, just like the Mac GUI was in 1984. And just like MSFT back then, it will again take them 10 years to realize it." I'd say touch interfaces are a definite part of the future, and probably will replace our common computer. And, despite unexciting, failed MS attempts to bring touch to the game, the iPhone is really what started the move to touch. But I'm thinking someone will steal the show from Apple, because the iPhone/iPad platform is just too closed and unfriendly -- whether it'll be Google, which already has tablet Chrome OS mockups up, or whether it'll be the less-and-less relevant Microsoft, or perhaps a completely new player remains to be seen. Or perhaps Apple will change its policies?

rr0de, you're a douchebag

It will be interesting to see how the ipad goes out of the gate but now with Apple preempting that the price will come down if it doesn't sell well leads me to the conclusion that the wait and see approach would be advantageous.

@de Silentio then what does that make you?