Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement, biography reveals
Summary: Jobs received hundreds of emails, 'most of them were complaining.'
Walter Isaacson's biography of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs is out, and it revealed how Jobs was left feeling 'annoyed and depressed' following the iPad announcement back in January 2010.
Isaacson recounts how Jobs had received hundreds of emails to his personal email account in the twenty four hours following the announcement and how 'most of them were complaining.'
'There's no USB cord! There's no this, no that. Some of them are like, "**** you, how can you do that?" I don't usually write people back, but I replied, "Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out." And some don't like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.'
The name, in particular, was cause cause for a lot of the negativity, and comments about how it sounded like feminine hygiene product reverberated across social media networks.
Isaacson tells how the 'public carping' continued until the iPad was released in April of 2010 and people actually got their hands on the new tablet ... a tablet that would not only change the tablet landscape, but the face of computing as a whole.
The book also reveals that Jobs was dissatisfied with the original iPad ads, thinking that they looked like Pottery Barn commercials.
Jobs told Isaacson:
'It was easy to explain what the iPod was - a thousand songs in your pocket - which allowed us to move quickly to the iconic silhouette ads. But it was hard to explain what an iPad was. We didn't want to show it as a computer, and yet we didn't want to make it so soft that it looked like a cute TV. The first set of ads showed we didn't know what we were doing. They had a cashmere and Hush Puppies feel to them.'
Even for Apple (maybe especially for Apple) advertising matters.
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Talkback
No limit for people's expectations
Especially if people think cliche so they could not image tablet without ..
Ok. Sure. Whatever
And Gates was right - the majority of iPad owners [b]still[/b] do any real/lengthy typing on a keyboard.
So maybe the public understood what the iPad was very usefull at, and what it wasn't - and Steve Jobs let his genius vision cloud his judgement at what people would give up to get an iPad.
Jobs never recommended iPad for uses that this device is not optimized for,
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
Not exactly. At all.
The vision was true? Hardly.
What happened was that millions who could scrape together the bucks for what they were being told was the next big thing, and from Apple no less, the company that had finally defined its image as a company that produced high end gadgets, went out and bought millions of the darn things. And of these millions many many didn't have enough high tech savvy to even think or ask about USB ports, optical disk drives and other such common necessities in a modern computing device. They unwittingly bought into Jobs real long term plan; deliver all content by way of a secure server on the net and virtually eliminate the potential for piracy. Without particular ports or drives it is neither practical or for most even possible to even think about trying to load something onto an iPad except from the net by way of whatever Apple approves.
I know scads of people who bought an iPad and now don't really know what to do with it now that they see what it can really do or not do.
Jobs apparently knew himself the pitfalls of the design, he didn't want to advertise the iPad as a computer, and thats clearly because it falls so short of even a netbook. And on the other hand he didn't want "to make it so soft that it looked like a cute TV", because $499 dollars is clearly way way too much for that. Even if thats what it largely is.
The vision was true? True to what??
Seriously. For vast numbers of the multiple millions who bought an iPad the greatest thing one can say about the product is that Apple/Jobs could sell such a hobbled device to so many for so much money and get away with it. Jeez, they even baffled the rest of the industry so much that they have sent numerous huge IT companies running in circles trying to figure out why these things sell and how to make something similar that sells as well.
Jobs usually lead the way in removing things.
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
USB isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Not with USB3 around the corner.
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
Around the corner?
As an FYI, if you plug your iPad into a USB3.0 port, it will charge - at least it does on my ASUS UL...
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
I say aroud the corner because, I have yet to see any USB3 devices.
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
For the sake of removing? The main use case for USB on an iPad is for charging the device. Just like the iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch that came before it, the iPad is able to charge when plugged into USB ports. this is not you traditional x86 computer where you must physically plug peripherals in before use (mouse, keyboard, printers). It's all about wireless technology like Airplay, bloutooth, iCloud. I can wirelessly send anything from my iPad to my printer. Grab any media or document from any one of my PCs around the home wirelessly from my iPad, useing Airplay and homesharing. Control and play music around the home, wirelessly on any iDevice. Take a pic on my iPhone and have it automatically pushed to my other shared devices and computers.
Forward thinking is what separated Jobs from the average CEO. Apple was the one that ushered in "Plug and Play", now it's all about wireless tech (Airplay, iCloud). Can't believe we are still talking USB.
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
Jobs was a pioneer alright...
...a pioneer in gradually pushing hardware in a direction that would make computing devices completely reliant on the internet for content.
I guess for some that sounds great, but to me it simply smacks of corporate greed and control. Eliminate the competition and potential piracy in one fell swoop.
I honestly believe Jobs long term goal was to have computing devices in peoples hands that made it impossible to deal with anything not specifically approved by Apple and thus eliminating anything that wasn't. I don't like that track and if that was his vision it wasn't a good one. Its more like a vision through beer goggles.
re:
Doesn't everyone get depressed after the launch?
You drink beer and comment on Zdnet till the next viable idea comes into your head!
But I also think he had good reason to be down. That iPad commercial had lots of fake knee shots where the iPad magically stuck to the knee while the guy used it two handed.
They wanted a kneeputer, but it didn't quite work as a kneeputer. I know they've added a stand/screen cover which partially fixes the problem, but I think there's still room for improvement there. Why slippery metal case, why not something more grippy?
Oh and portrait surfing needs more horizontal pixels for the majority of websites.
Mix those two demands into the big pot of possible things to change, and I wonder how the next CEO will select the ones that need fixed and ignore the ones that need dumped.
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
I guess the problem is that some people never understood what a tablet was meant to do and moaned becasue they wanted things to be the same as before.
An ipad works. A 90 year old can make it work and a 4 year old can make it work. The small percentage of techno geeks who want to start adding USB are not the products target market.
Now I have to get back to upgrading my Abit motherboard becasue windows 7 no longer likes it for some reason. One of the USB ports no longer works either which may account for why my windows mobile 6.5 phone would never sync properly.
RE: Jobs 'annoyed and depressed' following iPad announcement
Anyway, shows the true vision of Steve Jobs. One of the most scrutinized product in recent history is now selling like hot cakes.