my tablet
I’ve owned a iPad for several months. I use it much more than I expected. I’d use it even more than I do, but the AAPL “walled garden” prevents me.
My only real complaint is that the wi-fi chips AAPL uses in its tablets appear to be relatively weak, so mine (a “new” iPad) often wants to make a cellular connection. My wife’s (an iPad 2) has the same problem. Here on my back porch, my Macbook hooks up to our wi-fi without a problem; my iPad can’t make a connection. Design defect …or concession to the mobile network operators?
One more thing–I’ve spent much too much time playing Kingdom Rush.
in the schools
The iPad has picked up momentum in areas I hadn’t really thought about. For instance:
–AAPL commented in its 3Q12 earnings call that it is beginning to sell a ton of iPads to schools. They’re all iPad 2s, which apparently have hit a price point low enough to trigger mass orders.
–an interesting article in the Financial Times from late July outlines changes tablets are making in the scientific/medical press. It’s short and worth reading.
professional journals
Its message is that there is a surprisingly quick transition to online delivery going on with professional journals. For doctors’ publications, the positive points of online are:
-most physicians have and use tablets, especially for reading between patient appointments;
-doctors read close to double the amount of a journal’s content when they access it online rather than in print;
-they appear happy to watch video advertisements imbedded in the online articles; and
-the publisher has precise data to show advertisers about what online ads have been seen. For print, the publisher has to rely on surveying users–and who’s going to say he doesn’t read the journal from cover to cover?
Googling “tablets and medical journals”
My results were mostly about the perils of sleeping pills. But I did come across a medical student’s blog post on the merits of various tablets. Steven Chan’s conclusions are about what you’d expect, with one exception:
–using a tablet is a lot better than carrying files around with you
–if you’re hopeless with tech, get an iPad. It’s easy to use, but limited by the AAPL “walled garden”
–Android tablets are harder to get up and running but are much more useful
–the iPad is too big to fit into a standard white lab coat pocket. If you use an iPad you should get a new iPad-friendly model (this is the one I didn’t think about).
my investment point?
It’s about ecosystems. In a world of cloud storage, where individuals own multiple devices–smartphones, tablets, laptops–that they may want to function for both personal and work tasks, the choice of what products to use becomes less about how cool the individual device is and more about how the device allows one to access, share and save data.
Yes, everyone believes this, to one degree or another. In a “cloud” world, though, AAPL has two (well-known) weaknesses, I think. One is its “walled garden” approach, which makes it seem a little like AOL when the WorldWide Web was opening up in the 1990s. The other is how weak AAPL’s browser and productivity software are.
Again, no secrets here.
What’s interesting, though, is how this leaves the door open for MSFT, even after more than a decade of bungling, to become relevant again. It has an adequate browser, which seems to be losing its my-way-or-the-highway attitude. Its productivity suite is the world standard. More than that, MSFT seems to me to understand the new opportunity its position is giving it, and (for once) to be taking intelligent steps to exploit it.
Anyway, I’m starting to think I may have to take MSFT more seriously as a potential investment, for the first time this century. If I only thought MSFT had good management…