Obtuse ⇥

March sixth—one day before the iPad event—Rob Enderle published his predictions:

I think people are going to find it disappointing, […]

While it is an improvement over the iPad 2 . . . people are going to be expecting more.

It’s a day ending in “y”, so Rob Enderle said something dumb about Apple again. In his attempt to prove what he predicted, what reason do you suppose he offered?

a) Steve Jobs didn’t introduce it,
b) its dictation feature is similar to the handwriting feature on the Newton, or
c) people will buy the iPad 2 instead because it looks the same.

If you had a hard time deciding which of the above Enderle used to prop up his argument, it’s okay: the answer is d) all of the above. To prove point a, Enderle:

The fact that Apple couldn’t port Siri in time is particularly troubling, suggesting it’s having internal execution problems. That was further exemplified by its inability to keep the order sites up after launch.

Apple brought out a product that, on its face and if Jobs had presented it, would have exceeded expectations. But the company fell into the common trap of trying to make it seem better than it was.

Of course there is no evidence that they tried to port Siri to the new iPad any more than they did, nor that it was the result of internal management struggles. And, of course, pre-order sites have failed under Jobs. Enderle has a point he’s desperate to prove, though:

The Newton was a pretty amazing handheld tablet computer for its time. It significantly exceeded what any competing product could do. But Scully focused on handwriting recognition as the key feature and it sucked. […]

Dictation may be the new iPad’s handwriting recognition. Unable to get Siri to work on the new iPad, Apple instead dropped back to dictation.

This point would be a lot stronger if the dictation in the iPhone 4S were awful, but they aren’t. They’re pretty great. Sour grapes, Rob?

Even after March 16, there are likely to be old iPad 2s that folks are going to think are the new iPad. We aren’t, as a group, that observant.

Well you clearly aren’t, Rob.

So there will be some percentage of buyers who will buy the iPad 2 thinking it is the new iPad, and be pissed.

Rob can’t read, therefore nobody else can.

What could Apple’s motives be here? A normal observer would note that a $399 entry price severely undercuts the rest of the tablet market (save for products sold at a loss, like the Kindle Fire), reducing the price of entry for an iPad. Not Rob, though:

This decision was likely made to clean out old inventory on top of the price reduction, or in the hope that many of the vendors would sell the old iPad at the old price.

This isn’t a limited-time while-supplies-last offer, and I doubt Apple has a year’s worth of iPad 2 inventory laying around. They’re going to keep making new ones. Enderle’s other reason is entirely stupid.

This article hasn’t hit its jackass high with any of the quotes I’ve pulled, though. That happens at the beginning:

But the way it was announced reminded me more of John Scully’s Apple than Steve Jobs’ Apple. Steve was an expert at setting expectations that the product could beat, while Scully tended to overset expectations and folks were increasingly disappointed. Scully’s Apple had problems with execution as well. We saw all of that in the new iPad announcement. John Scully was the CEO who is famous for firing and replacing Steve Jobs in the 1980s, and I think Tim Cook is now the new John Scully.

Rob Enderle is an idiot.

This wouldn’t be noteworthy if Enderle were some kook with a small weblog. But according to his website, he’s the most-quoted tech analyst in the world.