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5by5 | 5by5 Specials #5: Fat Wireless: iPad 3rd Generation

Mar 8, ’12 7:14 AM
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Dan Benjamin is joined by Marco Arment of Instapaper.com and Horace Dediu of Asymco.com to discuss the just-announced Apple iPad 3rd Generation.

via 5by5 | 5by5 Specials #5: Fat Wireless: iPad 3rd Generation.

  • Pointebasic

    Horace,

    Just listening to this broadcast.  My thoughts on the iPad name being just “iPad”.  Your, Marco and Ben’s thoughts are right on. The iPad hardware updates, from now on, will be much more “pc” like.  That is price/battery life/weight/processor/memory…Can’t really get a “more retina” display, right? This, of course, is somewhat head in the sand thinking (of course there is some hardware feature we can’t imagine that perhaps Apple is working on).

    Realistically, major updates for the near future are in software and integration.  Which makes this change to generic naming “obvious” in hind sight.

    Thanks

  • Richard T

    Horace,

     

    Thanks for great analysis as usual. A couple of
    remarks/questions

     

    1) I thought naming it “iPad 2S” made sense given similar
    form factor. I appreciate the simplicity of genericizing, but wonder how it
    will impact Apple’s strategy of offering discounted pricing on last year’s model?
    It seems offering the iPhone 4S, 4 and 3GS at the same time will be impossible
    with future iPads (or will be very confusing naming wise). Surely a company
    like Apple will have thought this through, so it seems the broad portfolio
    strategy witnessed in the iPhone will not be used for the iPad?

     

    2) An alternative scenario might be that Apple will in the
    future actually come up with different form factors for the iPad and simply
    refer to it as the iPad 10”, iPad 12” (?) (my guess is that IF Apple does come
    up with variants it will be larger rather than smaller screens).

     

    3) As pointed, I was very pleasantly surprised about Apple
    being able to maintain current price point. I do wonder if it will eat into
    profit margins, but if it doesn’t, it truly reflects Apple’s astonishing
    economies of scale wrt display sourcing. I’m amazed at Apple’s engineering
    capabilities given the relatively minor weight/size penalty given the
    quadrupling of pixels