Feb 10

One quick thought of my own on the new Apple iPad

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2:20pm on Wednesday 10th February, 2010

So I just spent my lunch hour catching up with my neglected feedreader (tip: never let your feeds pile up over an Apple event!) and I haven’t seen anyone else raise this point, so here goes.

I don’t know about you, but personally my 16Gb iPhone is mostly full of music. There are a few odd podcasts, less than a hundred photos, and a couple-dozen apps, but for the most part—70, 80-percent—it’s music that takes up the space.

And that makes sense for what I use it for—as a phone, a portable music player, a games device and, occasionally, a camera.

Now consider the new Apple iPad, which comes in 16Gb, 32Gb and 64Gb sizes. If its primary target market is folks sat on their sofa, idly surfing the web, dealing with emails or playing games, does music really fit into that usage profile? I can’t imagine that the built-in speakers are that much cop, plus if you’re moving the thing around you’re hardly experiencing the optimal listening experience. Earphones? Not convenient, not like being able to slip your iPod or iPhone into your pocket when you need to get up and go somewhere. And anyway, who doesn’t have some other means of listening to music?

So what is going to take up all that flash drive space? It has various “Productivity” apps—word processing, spreadsheets, and so forth—but those don’t take up much space. iBooks? Again, they’re mostly text, they don’t need the space either.

So it’s got to be apps…

...and lots of them. Is Apple betting on the iPad to drive even more growth in App Store sales than they’ve already seen with the iPhone and iPod Touch?

And if you have trouble keeping track of a few dozen apps on your iPhone, how will you cope with a few hundred on an iPad?

I'd love to hear what you think - please use the form below to leave your comments. Some HTML is permitted: b, i, em, del, ins, strong, pre, code, blockquote, abbr. URLs or email addresses will be automatically converted into links.

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  1. Ian Tearle's Gravatar

    Ian Tearle at 2:59pm on 10th February, 2010 #

    Good point well made.

    Take into account though, Apple clearly made the iPad to boost sales in the app store even further, else they would have not locked users into proprietary apps. Apple could have made an iPad that accepted all applications that you can get on a desktop or macbook computer, that you can download from anywhere, but no, the only way you can get any new applications or software is by going through the app store, paying your money, in which a percentage goes to Apple direct.

    Apple are clever. Money making clever.

  2. Jonathan Whiteland's Gravatar

    Jonathan Whiteland at 4:06pm on 10th February, 2010 #

    Apple would be just as happy to sell you other non-music media though: TV shows and movies, which take up way more space even than Apps.

  3. Susana Fernandez's Gravatar

    Susana Fernandez at 1:54am on 2nd June, 2010 #

    It makes a lot of sense your point.

    I want to say that not all apps are paid. There are many good free apps and there is even a site that gives away one paid app for free every day. freeappaday.com


    There are 200K apps in the app store, I’m on favor of them some can be educational, fun, games, etc.. its same as programs for computers, just little programs for mobiles.. I dont find nothing wrong w them or with having a bigger case to store them and use them when i want.

    I’m not buying an ipad though, i prefer to spend the $ on shoes… hahaha ;)