With the release of the iPad mini, Apple is trying to caulk up the cracks in its iPad ecosystem. With that one gap filled in, we now essentially have a straight line going from iPod Nano all the way to Mac Book Pro,
Let’s try a thought experiment. Say you forgot your favorite Apple product at home before going out. We’ll run through a few different products, starting with an iPod. You get in the car, start driving, then turn to the person next to and say, most likely: “I forgot my iPod.”
That, in itself, doesn’t mean much. But consider what you didn’t say: “I forgot my portable Mp3 player.” To most people, the product isn’t Apple’s MP3 player – it’s an iPod. Plain and simple.
Now we try it with the iPhone. Again, you meant to bring it, you left it at home. You might say, “I forgot my iPhone,” but you will probably just say “I forgot my phone.”
It might seem like a silly distinction, but it matters. MP3 players were relatively new when Apple released the iPod, and weren’t well established in the popular psyche. When most people were introduced to the idea of owning a portable MP3 player, they were introduced via the iPod. Cell phones, however, were well-coded in the popular psyche by the time the iPhone came out. Sure, the iPhone was a different animal, but people by and large slotted it into they mental space they already had already established: “phone.”
This goes some of the way towards explaining why, 11 years after the introduction of the iPod, Apple still has a lock on the portable MP3 player market, but phones are becoming hotly contested space. Apple never truly owned the phone market, or even the smartphone market, which is why others were able to gain ground.
Now we try this with the iPad. Same drill. Do you turn to the person sitting next to you and say: “I forgot my tablet computer?” Probably not. That’s because “tablet computer” was a category that only entered popular consciousness after Apple introduced the iPad, and by that point, it was an iPad first and a tablet second.
To spend some time with the competition, this probably works with "Kindle." Nobody forgets their "e-reader." But we still think of the Kindle Fire as a "Kindle," and so it has a harder time moving to become a powerful force in tablets when it's closely associated with a different, ultimately distinct product. Amazon owns the e-reader like Apple owns tablets. And I just don't see Nexus 7 working in the same way -- though it might roll off the tongue better in other languages. This post is definitely from the American perspective.
The tablet market won’t be as easy for Apple as the iPod market was. Other companies are serious this time around, and a product like the Kindle Fire feels like stiffer competition than a Microsoft Zune. But I think that people still conceive of these devices as iPads before they conceive of them as tablets, and that means that anyone who isn’t selling an iPad has a lot of ground to make up. It's everyone else's move.
