Obviously, the competition within the Tablet market place which was created by Apple’s iPad is about to heat up in 2011. Yet does Apple already feel that threatened that it has to stoop to misquoting and being quite frankly untruthful? Sadly, it would seem so…
You’ve all no doubt watched or read about the new Apple iPad 2 launch event that happened on March 2ndlast week. What a lot of you will not realize is that despite previous mis-quotes Steve Jobs used facts and quotes that had previously already been shown to be false (some of them months ago). We will let you the reader decide whether Steve Jobs was intentionally mis-quoting to make his Apple product seem superior, or whether it was a slip up. TMV are erring on the side that it was deliberate.
In fact the factual errors coming out were numerous. Including the first, that apparently the iPad 2 is the “first dual core tablet to ship in volume”. Yet it has been brought to TMV’s attention that the Dell Streak 7, which has a dual core chip, has been shipping since January 2011 (6 weeks or more before the iPad 2 launch). Obviously, the Motorola Xoom also has a dual core processor and has been shipping in volume as well. The Apple iPad 2 is not even available for purchase until March 11th, so in real terms Apple have effectively shipped zero, zilch nada.
The really big mis-truth in Job’s presentation was when he misquoted a Samsung VP commenting about sales of the Samsung tablet. Instead of saying “sell out was quite small” the VP actually stated that, “sell out was quite smooth”. This misquoted was corrected (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/31/samsung-galaxy-tab-sales-actually-quite-small/) on January 31st 2011 (5 weeks before Apple’s iPad 2 launch), in numerous publications.
It also appears Steve Jobs is losing his grip on simple arithmetic, as both Samsung and Apple measure sales in the same manner: into the channel. Apple claims it has a greater than 90% market share in terms of the tablet market. But hold on a moment Samsung sold 2 million tablets in the fourth quarter of 2010 alone, whilst apple sold 14.8 million in three quarters. As such Apple would have had to sell 3.2 million more iPad’s to claim of 90% share against only the Samsung tablet (in triple the time). We all know there are many are tablets out there including windows OS tablets. If Amazon’s kindle are brought into the equation it could be stated with accuracy that Apple has not even reached 50% market share.
Jobs then went onto make price comparisons between the iPad 2 and the Motorola Xoom. However, comparing price points and missing out on actual component comparison’s renders the analysis quite frankly pointless. As the Xoom has a better and bigger screen, extremely impressive cameras with flash, and most importantly for ALL music lovers out their stereo speakers, whilst the iPad 2 has just one speaker. The Motorola Xoom even allows you to increase memory via a USB micro-SD card reader. In TMV’s view perhaps Jobs should have compared the iPad 2 to all of the android tablets out there, like the Samsung Galaxy tab which is priced at $499 in the US and still has a better camera, 3G and GPS all included. The same goes for the Dell Streak 7.
Whilst I have a lot of respect for Apple’s UI, its lack of respect for consumers of its products that it has to resort to clear cut false propaganda is a sad day for all of us. It is a sad day when out of fear of competition a company resorts to telling porky’s. In TMV’s view this clear break of consumer and business trust signals that Apple is on a downward slide in terms of both respectability and innovation.
