The iPad Air 2 Reveals Chink in Apple's Armor

With the introduction of the faster, thinner, goldier iPad Air 2 on Thursday, Apple has revealed a difference in its shiny armor. This difference is where the competitors have a chance to attack.

More of equal excellence

The iPad Air 2 certainly looks like an amazing feat of engineering - at just 6.1 millimeters thick, it's 18 percent thinner than its already super-thin predecessor. Its retina display is made up of three layers, fused side-by-side, with a coating that gives it the lowest reflectivity of any tablet screen on the market. It's an iPad Air, and it's better than before.

It will sell, and it will be profitable. More importantly, it will do its job and fill its place as a good tablet. The iPad has become a piece of armor for Apple.

Nevertheless, it is not so fully formed that there is no opening for a contestant. There are some customers who want their tablet to be more than just a tablet, and some people want their PC to be more than just a PC. How many? According to Apple, not many - but this may not always happen. There is a gap between what Apple is willing to make and what some customers want.

In fact, Apple went to great lengths to show how strong its iPad armor really is - due to this mission and justification Apple is providing another iPad Air ... 2.

Apple undoubtedly likes to fumble the numbers, but sometimes the numbers are less than cheerful bragging than downtrodden people in a section of the market, as they describe a defensive position as a leader.

The iPad was once the sword of Apple. This has been widely successful, as Apple CEO Tim Cook felt it was important to point out. In fact, in the first four years of its life, Apple sold over 225 million iPads, more than any other product in Apple's history.

Ipad vs pc

What happened in the last 12 months? Cook showed a graph describing the number of PC units that the top four competitors have sold - Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo. Of the 70 million units sold in the last 12 months, the iPad beat Lenovo's 57 million units, HP's 54 million, Dell's 40 million, and Acer's 24 million.

"And this is their entire PC lineup - every notebook, every desktop, every 2-in-1, every all-in-one, every toaster-refrigerator-in-one - all of these," Cook said.

So what goes on here? Cook is saying that the iPad market is healthy, despite an increase in iPad sales that Wall Street analysts believe may be a sign of doom and gloom.

He is pointing out that while the top four manufacturers may come up with some new designs, none of them have done any harm to Apple, and none have managed to look close to success while enjoying the iPad.

Furthermore, by tailoring iPads in terms of PC sales, he is very clearly asking the world to consider iPads with other types of personal computers - especially for analysts saying that right now Also count them separately from the form factors that make up the ship with certain factors. Physical keyboards (and for the wider technical press that recalibrate such numbers).

100 percent love

Cook had more, though: "What's more important to us is that the iPad is consistently ranked No. 1 in customer satisfaction. That's what makes our heart sing."

He said that the iPad Air has reached a 100 percent customer satisfaction rating. This is mind-blowing, certainly - but why?

Cook attributed this to the iPad's "unique blend of simplicity and capability", and the fact that you can do so many things on an iPad and have such a great experience doing so. He noted the 675,000 app custom designed for the iPad, noting that it "outweighed our competition."

He then pulled out a quote from Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge: "A tablet is only as good as you can do with it, and thanks to hundreds of thousands of applications for the iPad Air, you can do more with it. Than any other tablet. "

The problem with this ideology is that Apple wants to convince all of us that the thin and tasteful physical texture of the iPad Air 2 is the ultimate peak of form and function for tablets - the pinnacle of design for a screen you can touch , Pinch to zoom, and jerk to interact with.

In Apple's world, you get to do these things on iPhones and iPads and Apple Watches - not just Macs or anything else. This is either a failure of imagination, or a hard-core desire to produce discrete elements of a product lineup that fit the greatest needs for most people.

Apple's approach to a product lineup - perhaps the only exception is the customizable Apple Watch - is to let its customers fit themselves into the core principles of a product - and then innovate from within that self-selected box. This is really fantastic, as it leads to 100 percent customer satisfaction.

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