Obviously, as ‘news’ indicates, the competition within the tablet-marketplace, which Apple’s iPad started, is about to heat up in 2011 – however, is Apple already feeling the threat in that it has to resort to misquoting and being (quite frankly) untruthful? Sadly, it would seem so…
You’ve all, no doubt, watched or read about the new Apple iPad-2 launch that occurred on March 2 last week. What a lot of you will not realise is that Steve Jobs used facts and quotes that have previously already been proven to be false (some of them months ago). We will let you, the reader, decide whether Steve Jobs was intentionally misquoting to make his Apple product appear superior, or whether it was a slip up. TMV are erring on the side that it was deliberate, or else Mr. Jobs would look quite the fool – and we all respect him enough to know that Apple’s CEO is
no a damn fool.
In fact, the factual errors coming out were numerous. The first, that apparently the iPad 2 is the “first dual core tablet to ship in volume”. Yet it has been brought to TMV’s attention that the Dell Streak 7, which has a dual core chip, has been shipping since January 2011 (6 weeks or more before the iPad 2 launch). Obviously, the Motorola Xoom also has a dual core processor and has no doubt been shipping in volume as well. The Apple iPad 2 is not even available for purchase until March 11th, so in real terms Apple have effectively shipped zero, zilch, not a single unit yet.
The really big miss-truth in Job’s presentation was when he misquoted a Samsung VP commenting about sales of the Samsung tablet. Instead of saying “sell out was quite small” the VP actually stated that, “sell out was quite smooth”. This misquote was corrected on January 31st 2011 (5 weeks before Apple’s iPad 2 launch), in numerous publications, both online, offline and on TV. So it is incredibly doubtful Steve and his team could have missed it.
It also appears Steve Jobs is losing his grip on simple arithmetic, as both Samsung and Apple measure sales in the same manner: into the channel. Apple claims it has a greater than 90% market share in terms of the tablet-market. But hold on a moment – Samsung sold 2 million tablets in the fourth quarter of 2010 alone, whilst Apple sold 14.8 million over three quarters. As such, Apple would have had to sell 3.2 million more iPad’s to claim the 90% share, against only the Samsung tablet (in triple the time). We all know there are many other tablets out there including windows OS tablets. If Amazon’s Kindle were brought into the equation it could be stated with accuracy that Apple has not even reached 50% market share.
Jobs then went onto make price comparisons between the iPad 2 and the Motorola Xoom. However, comparing price points and missing out on actual component comparisons renders the analysis quite frankly pointless – as the Xoom has a better and bigger screen, extremely impressive cameras with flash, and (most importantly for ALL music lovers) boasts stereo speakers, while the iPad 2 has just one speaker. The Motorola Xoom even allows you to increase memory via a USB micro SD card reader. In TMV’s view, perhaps Jobs should have compared the iPad 2 to all of the android tablets currently available, like the Samsung Galaxy tab which is priced at $499 in the US and still has a better camera, 3G and GPS all included. The same goes for the Dell Streak 7. Comments Apple?
While I have a lot of respect for Apple’s UI, their clearly illustrated lack of respect for consumers of its products, so that it has to resort to clear-cut false propaganda, is a sad day for all. It is especially sad when, out of fear of competition, a company resorts to telling porky’s. In TMV’s view, this clear breach of consumer and business trust signals that Apple is on a downward slide in terms of both respectability and innovation. Despite this, it would not surprise TMV if all the apple fanboys continue to blindly follow Steve Jobs as their Guru who is leading them down a path to excessively priced and under-performing products. It’s rather sickening to witness such unquestioning devotion, almost as bad as the naivety of Tea Party followers…
