Last February, I happened to write a post about my disappointment with the Ipad. Well, guess they are making it a reality with mac app store and the Ipad 2! Good strategy I should admit. Why lose out on the money when you can cater to different people with different kinds of products with different USP. And when the market is slightly bored, you combine them, pack it up and keep it rolling. The following scenario is pretty common and one of the main reasons for driving the sales for the apple A1 team. John Iyengar who is a mac user buys an Iphone, a must have phone for all apple fans. His neighbor Jim Iyer finds that the phone form factor is cool and buys the Iphone. He is now an apple fan! He then gets the Ipod touch and anything apple for his family! He then thinks about jumping to mac, but he is not ready yet. He is amazed by the new Ipad and the amount of stuff he can do. By the way, he is so blinded that an Ipad without a camera is absolutely fine. So now he is hooked on to everything apple except mac. Jim wants a macbook pro now! But he knows they update products on a regular cycle, so he waits. But hey, here comes the apps on the mac! And now not only Jim but all Tom, Dick and Harry who wanted to buy something applecious, decide to buy a mac as its a laptop and also the good sweet world of apps. People who still want a light portable tablet will go for Ipad2 when it does release. If that still doesn’t tempt people to buy a mac, bite into this, the next mac book will have solid storage devices, light peak, no optical drives making it a light device (rumors included). And slowly apple eats away into PC share. Happy ending!
Taking a more different view, apple has restricted on how the apps developed for the mac runs. This sorts off helps in targeting a few classes of people. The group of people who feel that apps can manage everything and possibly replace the traditional software (which it does in many cases). The second appeals to that set of users who complain of not having enough software for the mac and thus stick to Windows. This would bring a lot of apps/software if I can call it, to the mac making it an amazing pitch for a crash free, proven app field for the mac. There will definitely be a lot of interaction of the traditional mac OS world and the apps making it extremely convenient as its the best of two worlds.
The game center app can now have more online gaming, the file sharing apps can now play around with the cloud storage. A lot of useful productivity apps which many people use on the iphone can work on the mac. All apps on the devices can sync seamlessly and finally people who love the apps but don’t find a use for an Ipad will get a mac as it works both ways.
How it might shape up? Folks already get their work done on their Iphone with a lot of apps including browsing, watching media content and even play. The mac app store would give the same and we would see people using their traditional OS only for better browsing and media content experience. The rest of the work can be done on the mac apps world and can be carried to their iphone/ipads.
With macs shifting to the new Intel chips, more stronger gaming? At first, I felt they were repainting the same picture over and over again on different devices. But to think of it in a simpler sense, Mac OS becomes the base like the firefox browser, but most people use firefox for its amazing addons. Time to draw attention to what Apple started initially, the Mac! More reasons to buy a mac, I guess.
Posted on December 16, 2010
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