[sc:mobile-category ]I was following the Engadget live blog feed from the iPad 3 announcement the other day and two things kind of struck me:
- Apple REALLY wants this to be the post PC era
- Tim Cook is really trying hard to maintain the reality distortion field Steve Jobs created
Post-PC?
Why Apple wants to be in the post PC era is pretty obvious, it failed to conquer the PC era so the best why to win is to say we’ve passed that now. It’s a good marketing strategy, but are we really past the PC? Or are we just in a lull between PC revolutions?
The more I use my TouchPad, the more I feel there’s something big missing on current tablets, and I think that it’s a proper OS. My tablet usage is pretty much down to reading e-mail and using an RDP client to get to a Windows desktop so I can do what I really want to do. Things like going to a website that has a login and not having to remember the password because EVERY desktop browser has a built-in password store.
I think Microsoft is going to get a lot of things right with Windows 8 on tablets and that may be the real PC revolution that kills the post-pc era 
.
Reality?
Steve Jobs was famous for single mindedly pursuing his version of reality, no matter what anyone else thought. That cult of personality really helped Apple and Tim Cook is now trying to maintain the same effect.
A quote from Tim Cook at the press conference:
We are redefining the category that Apple created with the original iPad.
Really? Because all I see is a high-resolution screen upgrade, a processor upgrade, a camera upgrade and a wireless upgrade.
The category already had all those features, the “new iPad” just did incremental upgrades to them. So not so much “redefining” as simply “this years model”.
And let’s talk about the name, is Apple so scared to move on versions numbers these days that they now have to get rid of them entirely?
This is really the second lackluster product announcement from Apple, the iPhone 4s was similarly just incremental improvements in the hardware.
And speaking of the 4s, where’s Siri on the iPad? They can’t claim it doesn’t have the processing power like they did with the iPhone 4.
I suspect Apple is going to have a long slide downhill over the next decade, but they’ve turned it around before, maybe they will again.
