The other day, a blogger for a certain popular online publication listed five tablets that allegedly presented compelling alternatives to the iPad 3. After reading the article — and it doesn’t deserve a link — along with  similar rants about how the tech industry can really hold off the iPad onslaught, I’ve come to the conclusion that I must be living on a different planet.

Now I realize that no single product can possibly be perfect, and there are certainly ways in which Apple can improve the iPad in form or function. But one of the hallmarks of Apple design is to know what features to omit, or remove. It’s also true that Apple won’t add a feature unless it works, at least passably. Compare that to tech companies who can’t see beyond their PowerPoint presentations.

If there’s an area where Apple might enhance the iPad, it’s in expandability. Now I understand that Apple wants to build appliance-like gear. That means they are meant to be fully functional out of the box without tinkering, and I suppose having a slot you can open to remove a Flash memory card amounts to tinkering of some sort. However, it’s not as if you are going to just replace your $499 iPad 3 because 16GB isn’t sufficient, and buy the $699 64GB version. You can sell it off, of course, and suffer a loss, but why? Surely Apple can devise some convenient method that allows you to replace the memory without having to seriously tarnish the seamless looks. Besides, isn’t true that most of you will be putting your iPad in a case anyway?

So much for legitimate criticism.

Other complaints include the resolution of the front and rear cameras. If other tablet makers can install eight megabit sensors on their backs, why not Apple? What about the fact that the iPhone 4s has eight megapixels? Now I wouldn’t care to comment on design considerations and the cost of the raw parts. Assuming Apple had to spend a fair amount extra for that nifty Retina Display, not to mention a beefier battery to keep battery life at the same level as older models, perhaps they decided to do a little cost-cutting on other parts. Now maybe a few dollars here and there isn’t important, but such “luxuries” can have an impact on the bottom line. Apple may also have concluded that customers would be more likely to shoot movies than snapshots on an iPad, and felt five megapixels was a worthy compromise. In the real world, Apple has better camera software than the competition, so they can get the most bang for the buck. That’s something the critics tend to avoid.

Another common criticism is the lack of a smaller model, to compete head-on with the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook. At the same time, there have been more and more rumors that Apple is seriously considering some sort of “light” or “mini” iPad, and that parts for an alleged 7.85-inch model are already being sampled. But I do wonder the logic behind that claim, other than the possibility that Apple experiments with all sorts of products that never see the light of day.

As most of you recall, Steve Jobs once seriously denigrated the value of a smaller iPad. Remember, this is not just a consumption device. Apps like iPhoto have an assortment of tools and fancy features that, while they work all right on an iPhone, only come into their own on the 9.7-inch iPad display. Having played with smaller tablets, I agree with Jobs that you’d probably have to sandpaper your fingers to be able to accomplish the same tasks as efficiently. The iPad is meant to be a general purpose computing device. In contrast, a Kindle Fire is essentially a glorified e-book reader with the ability to play videos. Beyond basic consumption, it’s simply not very good. But I suppose people who couldn’t afford an iPad — or who just wanted something to consume Amazon content — might have been willing to buy one.

In short, I don’t believe the rumors. Apple is not going to make a smaller iPad unless there’s a compelling reason to do so, nor are they going to make a larger iPod touch, which is essentially what such a device might be.

But the one thing the critics won’t address when they point to potential alternatives to the iPad is that amazing Retina Display. Getting that thing into an iPad, keeping the price and battery life the same as the previous model, was no small feat. Go ahead and find one on any competing tablet, or even a note-book computer, and let me know what you come up with — and at what price.

Sure, other companies will want to build tablets with a similar display, and they will some day. But I’m willing to suggest that Apple owns all or most of the production of such parts for now, just as they have first digs at the majority of the world’s Flash memory.

While I have no doubt that a smart company could build a better tablet than the iPad, the ones to which the critics point just can’t be taken seriously.

If you can believe Apple’s ubiquitous iPhone ads, Siri is a magical and absolutely brilliant digital personal assistant who can answer all your questions cheerfully, sometimes with an appropriately pithy and even humorous response. If you can believe a certain disgruntled customer from New York City, who recently filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple, Siri is tone deaf, to put it mildly. Reports from Japan indicate Siri support is, a yet, extremely buggy.

All this for something that’s little more than a smart voice recognition scheme.

Well, I suppose it’s all Apple’s fault. You expect them to walk on water. Everything must operate perfectly all the time, and the easy fashion in which people find information with Siri will doubtless result in overconfidence. It doesn’t matter if the fine print on all those ads featuring Siri reveals that the segments were cut down from the originals. It doesn’t matter that Siri still carries a “beta” label, meaning it’s not finished and apt to be buggy. That it works as well as it does, considering the limitations, ought to be amazing.

I also wonder about the silly class-action lawsuits that claim some sort of injury because Siri isn’t perfect. Does the fact that you may have to ask a question more than once, or that Siri takes “her” own sweet time coming up with an answer, somehow hurt your lifestyle or your wellbeing?

But this goes to the issue of the value of such lawsuits. I understand perfectly well that a company whose products cause serious injury or illness ought to be held accountable. But when someone who buys a consumer electronics product claims injury because a feature isn’t perfect, you have to wonder what they expect.

This harkens back to that recent legal settlement with Apple over the alleged Antennagate problems. When it was revealed that you could seriously harm an iPhone 4’s reception quality by holding it in a certain way, that became a scandal. It didn’t matter that other mobile handsets suffer from similar problems if held in a certain way, which differs from model to model. At least Apple came up to the plate and offered a free bumper to anyone who wasn’t satisfied with the way their iconic smartphone worked. Although the offer expired some weeks later, it has been reported that Apple continued to give them away to customers who still had problems.

At the end of the day, the settlement gave disgruntled customers two options: A free bumper, worth about $30, or $15 in cash. In other words, they got nothing more than they would have received had they simply asked for a free bumper. Indeed, Apple actually offered a selection that included third-party cases. The settlement only offers Apple’s brand, unless you take cash. At the same time, it’s a sure thing that the legal team that represented those complainers got healthy cash settlements. But that’s how such things usually work.

To me at least, the Siri lawsuit seems to have even less of a chance for settlement, though I suppose you can always find a lawyer willing to chase Apple in the hope of a huge payday. Maybe Apple would just settle and not be bothered, since they are devoting so much of their attention to suing competitors for alleged patent infringement.

As to Siri, my experiences so far have been decent. I understand that it’s beta and I’m not expecting miracles. Besides, there is no provision to train the recognition process, although I gather it improves over time as the software learns your voice, your accent, and your various speech inflections.

I would think that my speech is reasonably clear, considering my background as a broadcaster. Most vestiges of my regional accent are gone, though I expect speech experts will hear things that I do not hear. No matter. That means that my verbal patterns ought to be easy to recognize. But I would wonder about someone with a strong regional accent. The person who filed that Siri lawsuit is from Brooklyn, NY. Maybe Siri doesn’t understand “Brooklynese,” The same may be true for someone who normally converses in another language and thus may pronounce common words differently. Notice that Apple has been careful in rolling out Siri support to different countries.

Here’s a sample of a typical voice recognition defect: I have a close relative with a “z” in his last name. I have a business contact with a similar last name that has an “s” in it. Siri insists on “hearing” an “s” when I recite my relative’s name, even though I stretch pronunciation of the proper letter. Thus I am constantly being switched to the wrong entry in my contact list. I suppose this is understandable. More general requests, however, seem to deliver reasonably rapid and accurate results.

But remember that Siri is essentially the front end to a search engine. If the information is not on your iPhone 4s, Siri will go online to find it, with varying degrees of success. When I asked Siri, for example, to tell me where Eden’s Grill, a great Mediterranean restaurant in Phoenix, was located, I got the correct answer right away. Unfortunately, Siri was flummoxed when I inquired about the location of a nearby restaurant, Chompies, which is where I actually asked the question. The staff was still slightly amused.

Maybe I’m just a pushover, but it’s still easy to take a liking to Siri. She identifies me with a nickname, even, “UFO Man.” I’m sure most of you know why.

How could it be otherwise? The latest and greatest iPad became available for preorder on March 7th. Through Friday, you could even be assured of delivery by March 16th. But the news came down Saturday that demand was, as expected, “off the charts,” and the initial allocation for online delivery was gone. You could take your chances at a local retailer, most likely an Apple Store, when the thing goes on sale, and take your chances, or just be patient.

When I wrote this article, Apple’s online store listed two to three week delivery times. Best Buy’s site, as of the time I checked, was dominated by what we call the iPad 3, with no online ordering option. But they promised they’d have them in stores on launch day. Obviously, they didn’t promise how many would be available for each store, or in which configuration. But you could still order an iPad 2 if you wanted.

Sellouts shortly after an iPhone or an iPad are introduced are the norm. You expect that sales of every new model will exceed the previous version by a huge margin. But isn’t Apple also facing the inevitable slowdown in sales growth that affects all large companies eventually? At same point, expected demand will be saturated, and sales growth will more and more depend on replacements. The bigger, bolder, badder syndrome can only go so far.

Certainly, the iPod is an example of a product that’s past its prime. While Apple continues to have well over 70% of the market, these days more and more people are using smartphones as portable musical players. Consider the iPhone the ultimate iPod.

When it comes to mobile handsets, they are replaced frequently, usually when the contract is up. Then you are inundated with lots of promotional material about the latest and greatest, and don’t you want to reup for another two years? Surely the iPhone 4s benefitted from this replace cycle, as folks with the iPhone 3GS and older models were only too ready to upgrade. The same is true for the third generation iPad, even though there are no wireless contracts to expire — or break. A surprisingly large percentage of users are reportedly considering the new model. I suppose they’ll either hand off the old iPads to family members, or maybe sell them on eBay.

The real question, however, is how long can Apple sustain 50% and 100% annual sales growth curves before most everyone who wants an iPad will have one — or a successor product? That’s the dilemma PC makers are confronting now, as sales growth slows, and the largest increases are occurring in newly developed countries, where millions are buying their first PCs. Even in the PC market, Apple manages to exceed the sales growth rate of the industry year after year. Only a small percentage of possible customers are buying Macs, but they may actually move to the iPad instead in the years to come.

If what Steve Jobs said about the Post-PC era is correct, more and more people who might have bought a PC will choose an iPad instead. The PC will remain the pick-up truck bought by heavy-duty users, but in much smaller quantities.  Over the years, PC sales will inevitably decline, and Mac growth will trail off. Eventually, the Mac will be where the iPod is now, yesterday’s product catering to a smaller and smaller user base until something else comes along that replaces the PC and, perhaps, even the iPad.

Yes the iPad is a new market, and I hesitate to call it a tablet market simply because other companies have gone nowhere. Even the Amazon Kindle Fire is little more than a glorified e-book reader with mobile computing pretensions. But that might be all Amazon wants or needs. If you want a general purpose tablet, you go to Apple.

Over time, there will likely be mobile computing devices that will make an iPhone and iPad seem obsolete, although both form factors seem so basic in what they do. Even “Star Trek” had mobile handsets (the “communicator”) and a tablet of one sort or another. Until we are internally wired with all the computing and communications implants we need, maybe these two will be the fundamental solutions.

Regardless, expecting Apple to continue to grow as fast as it is now year after year is a stretch. If they did, they’d overwhelm the planet in the not-too-distant future. Over time, the revenue curve will no doubt flatten. They will have to continue to move out into different markets to sustain the brand. Some day, another company, barely a startup now, might succeed Apple on the world’s stage. Success isn’t guaranteed, success isn’t forever, as so many multinational corporations have come to realize.

Or, if humans venture out to the stars in the decades to come, those corporations might grow with them. Maybe the Apple of 2112 will be selling to a galaxy-wide audience. Some of the competition may not even be, well, human.

But as we leave our sci-fi world, Apple can still grow at a decent clip for a number of years, although at a slower rate, even if they are destined to be Earthbound.

I do wonder why some people expect Apple to totally rework a successful product with every revision, including a substantial case redesign. To them, looks count for everything, witness the way the iPhone 4 to iPhone 4s upgrade was criticized. Put one against the other, and it was almost impossible to tell them apart, which means it was at best a tiny update to some.

It doesn’t matter that Apple went ahead and enhanced most every component. The camera went from five megapixels to eight megapixels, the integrated processor and graphics chip was far speedier, and a diversity antenna system essentially vanquished the last vestiges of Antennagate. And there’s Siri.

Sure, I suppose Apple could have revised the casings too, but that would have forced those who develop carrying cases for the product to remake their designs. Even the tiny position differences of the volume buttons between the GSM and CDMA versions of the iPhone 4 caused trouble for some accessory makers. At least Apple tried to show a little respect in revising the product. Besides, when you use your iPhone, do you just stare at it and marvel at its looks, or do you actually try to use it? And if you have it hidden in a case for protection, as I do, does any of this really matter?

Continue Reading…