Sometimes it takes a few days for these things to stew. Sometimes it takes a village. In my
ipad2 smart cover, it took a roundtable I cohosted on Leo Laportes weekly TWiT show to put together an explanation in my mind for the mistakes and missteps at Apples
ipad 2 case announcement last week.
What am I alluding to? The fact that CEO Steve Jobs fed us a few too many tidbits that didnt add up or simply were wrong. Jobs could be forgiven if he was off his game -- his cameo appearance last week came during a much publicized medical leave of absence. But his handlers ought to have known better.
Specifically, Jobs claimed that the
ipad 2 covers would be the first tablet based on a dual-core processor to ship in volume. Wrong. The Motorola Xoom and the Dell Streak both feature dual-core processors. Did Jobs simply make up his own definition of "volume," or did someone on Apples PR team not do his or her homework?
Jobs repeatedly claimed were in a "post-PC" era, where specs no longer are necessary to define a product. Its all about the user experience, he said. Yet during the press conference Jobs read plenty of specs off the big screen, though he left out the ones (like the
leather ipad 2 covers relatively crappy 1024x768 screen resolution) that might make iPad 2 look less than cutting edge.
More obviously, Jobs stood in front of a blown-up quote allegedly from a competitor that, upon further review, had an enormous mistake in it -- a "typo" that fell entirely in Apples favor. The quote, attributed to a Samsung VP and referring to Samsungs Galaxy Tab tablet, read: "As you heard, our sell-in was quite aggressive ... around two million. In terms of sell-out, it was quite small.
