It’s obvious who the early buyers of the iPad will be: the fanboys and early adopters who just have to have the latest Apple toy. Pre-orders for the iPad have been open for a week, and already people are trying to work out how many have been sold so far. Daniel Tello, for example, has analysed order-tracking numbers from the Apple store and concluded that around 190,000 iPads were pre-ordered in the first week. But that doesn’t reveal anything about who will buy the iPad later on, or how they will use it. Indeed, it seems Apple itself is unsure of the answer, and is hedging its bets.Is the iPad aimed at road warriors, who will use it in place of a MacBook or other laptop? That’s the implication of the iWork suite, which positions the iPad as a device you can do useful work on and consists of fully functional apps, not cut-down companion apps. But road warriors also want grown-up features like multitasking and cameras for videoconferencing, neither of which are present. Perhaps that is to keep the price down to make the iPad more attractive to a broader audience, who might just want a media-playback device with the ability to do a bit of e-mail, browsing and Facebook — a bigger iPod touch, in other words.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/03/apples_ipad
Even Apple doesn’t know who its iPad is for
It’s obvious who the early buyers of the iPad will be: the fanboys and early adopters who just have to have the latest Apple toy. Pre-orders for the iPad have been open for a week, and already people are trying to work out how many have been sold so far. Daniel Tello, for example, has analysed order-tracking numbers from the Apple store and concluded that around 190,000 iPads were pre-ordered in the first week. But that doesn’t reveal anything about who will buy the iPad later on, or how they will use it. Indeed, it seems Apple itself is unsure of the answer, and is hedging its bets.