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Did you take 117 minutes out of your day to watch the latest Apple product announcement event?
Why does Apple have such a monopoly on these "must watch" product rollouts?
I love watching these Apple events online, but I don't think I'd ever want to attend one of these keynotes live. It sort of creeps me out when the audience applauds Apple's huge sales numbers, effusively applauding all the shiny products. I'd rather hang out with the skeptics, the naysayers, and the marginalized. An H.P. keynote might be more my speed.
4 Reactions:
1. Apple Stores and Residential Campuses: Anyone who thinks that the residential campus experience is going away anytime soon has not absorbed the lesson of Apple's retail stores. 380 worldwide stores in 12 countries. 83 million visitors to Apple stores in the last quarter. A million people a day. Build a better store, or a better campus, and people will want to come.
2. Be An Academic Iconoclast - Buy a Windows Laptop: Apple notebooks are now #1 in market share, with a 27% market share. On my campus it is unusual to seen an undergraduate with anything but a mac laptop. This is an example of the consumer world catching up with the academic world. The people on campus who continue to buy Windows laptops are colleagues in business and some folks who use specialized analytical applications. How far can Apple's academic laptop dominance go? Are you a recent higher ed Windows laptop purchaser? What drove your iconoclastic decision?
3. The "Post PC" or the "PC + Tablet" Era: Apple loves to talk about how the iPad has ushered in the "post-PC era". They site the 17 million iPads sold in the last quarter, with a total of 84 million units shipped. But everyone I know that owns an iPad also owns a laptop. Can you imagine permanently dumping your computer for a tablet? I can't. This is why that I think that Apple is vulnerable to the low-priced Android tablets. I'd rather put my money into a good laptop rather than spending these dollars on an iPad. The Android tablets will keep getting both better and cheaper - and despite the current iPad dominance I see an erosion of market share over the next couple of years.
4. Upgrading to the iPhone 5 - Not: The new longer iPhone 5 looks great. Faster processor, sharper screen, better wireless, longer battery. All wonderful. But none of these hardware features would motivate me to shell out the money to swap out my old iPhone 4. What would make me switch is if Apple built educational platforms deeply into the iOS 6 operating system, and complemented this software with some hardware innovation. (The Siri, Facebook, and audio integration in iOS 6 is one example - swap Facebook for an LMS an you get the picture of what I'm thinking about). It is clear that the gaming people were at the table when the iPhone 5 was conceived - a great gaming platform. Were there education people at that same iPhone 5 design table?
What are your reactions to Apple event?
