FirstAlert(tm) Daily 2/9: iShrug

- Market Commentary -

February 9, 2010 (FinancialWire) (By Philip Holmes) — Have you been bothered by your own tepid, underwhelmed reaction to the introduction of Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) latest product, the iPad? Take heart: new surveys say you’re not alone, or crazy.

Like many people I was nonplussed by the iPad. But I was also disturbed as hell by that reaction. After all, the economy remains in the doldrums, and no one seems to have a handle on fixing it. But Apple has consistently provided a gleaming ray of hope in this gloom: here was a company that seemed to GET IT, no matter how dark the times were.

With the iPhone, and the new Macs, Apple grew and prospered and helped to remind us that life, and innovation and success would go on.

We were ready for more when Steve Jobs took to the stage at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show – amid much hype — to give us… the iPad. The device was immediately famous around the world. Awareness of its features, price and design grew at lightning speed. But then came the global shrug.

According to Sci-Tech Today’s Adam Dickter, “Surveys by Retrevo Pulse and ChangeWave found market awareness but few people who plan to buy an iPad.”

Retrevo Pulse’s survey of 1,000 people found that, in the days immediately following the launch, awareness of the iPad grew, but “the number of those who knew about it but were not interested doubled from 26 percent to 52 percent.”

Larry Magid, writing for CBSNews.com and Mercury News, finds the iPad “underwhelming” and tells us why. Part of this was the enormous hype that preceded the introduction.

Says Magid, “Had Apple called this device the ‘iPod touch 2,’ I would have praised it as a really good follow-up to an excellent product. I would have still questioned whether there is a market for a device that’s too big to put in your pocket but not as easy to type on as a laptop, but I would have given Apple the benefit of the doubt, just as I did with Lenovo.”

(It’s kind of like Obama’s health care plan: if he’d simply called it, “RomneyCare Maximus,” it might not have been such a raging, scary disappointment.)

Performance-wise, the iPad promises to be a bit better than an iPhone, but not up to speed as a notebook. Hence the talk of stripped down hardware and apps; no Word, much less Autocad. No 500 gig harddrive, etc. etc. It’s a lame little computer but an impressive cell-phone with a huge screen.

Then there’s the AT&T angle. According to Wired, the iPad is set up for a SIM card, but not the same one that’s currently in your smartphone. The idea is to get more people paying monthly for AT&T’s data plan, rather than just popping their iPhone SIM into their iPad on the fly. Lame. Lame. Lame.

This gets at the heart of my own unease about this product. Tablet computers are a fine adjunct to the smartphone and laptop, for the man who has everything. But they are a luxury item – one that will do little to increase most peoples’ work productivity. In these dark times few can afford such gizmos. Especially at $500 a pop.

It’s the out-of-touched-ness of the whole thing that rankles. All this hype for a yuppie toy. One that demands that you pay yet another cell phone bill each month. What we don’t need these days is yet another example of clueless corporate hacks foisting more consumer electronic flotsam at a beleaguered populace and calling it “magical.”

We need the technology equivalent of Victory Gardens, or at least products that don’t take us all for bored fools with lots of room on our credit cards.

[Go to http://www.financialwire.net/?s=philip+holmes to see more commentaries by Philip Holmes.]

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Today in History: After no presidential candidate received a majority of electoral votes, the United States House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams President of the United States in 1825. The first Japanese arrived in Hawaii in 1885. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was established as a Cabinet-level agency in 1889. William G. Morgan invented volleyball in 1895. Daylight-saving time went into effect in the United States in 1942. Red scare: Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the United States State Department of being filled with Communists in 1950. Joanne Woodward received the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. The Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. In 1971, Satchel Paige became the first Negro League player to become voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

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