Why the iPad 2012 could be the cornerstone of Apple’s ecosystem strategy

and three game-changing iPad 2012 features which no one is talking about...

Yet another Apple event, yet another iDevice, and yet another record-breaking news item.  Apple announced yesterday that they have sold 3 million Retina-laden iPads well inside it's first week since launch; 3 days to be precise!!!  If one thought the previous iPad sales numbers exhibited a certain degree of deranged excitement on the part of buyers, try this.  The original iPad took 80 days to cross 3 million mark and yet was considered to be a stellar success back in 2010.
  
What's strangely surprising is the way in which Apple's consistent run-away success has subtly numbed our collective conscience towards record sales numbers.  Surely no one expected Apple to sell any less of the iPad Retina during it's first week debut, did we?  We all expect Apple to throw game-changing curve balls at the competition and so there's nothing novelty about the idea...  I believe this particular generation of iPad could well turn out to be a critical piece in Apple's (and so often as it turns out to be, the industry's) game changing moment.   

If you ask Malcolm Gladwell, he'd refer to this as the beginning of tipping point of post-PC era - a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than a possibility.

Here's my list of three potential game changers with iPad Retina which no one is talking about as yet...

1. Retina display meet HTML5, your best buddy: 
No, I don't plan to drool over the 'resolutionary' display quality of the new iPad since the entire industry has already done that.  I haven't seen the display personally so I'll reserve my comments about it for later.  I am referring to the impact of such a high-res (imagine more resolution than your 50" LED TV on a display that's 40" smaller and you'll get an idea) on core user experience - viewing experience (since a tablet's most enduring feature is the display itself).   

Everyone remembers the bitter war Apple had waged with Adobe over Flash and HTML5 as a dominant standard for web content.  

Years ago, they saw the tablet trend over the horizon and started rallying their support towards HTML5.  Amongst its other benefits, HTML5 has the ability to scale up content to the device's native resolution without any intervention from the developers. 

This is a prime example of Apple's brilliance in the ability to spot a long-term trend and then put itself into a posture that will allow strategy execution. 

Long story short, Apple's aggressive push towards HTML5 as a dominant standard for web content will start to pay rich dividends with the iPad Retina.  Here's how - users surfing HTML5 sites will see the content scale up to the famed Retina resolution delivering a superior experience than anything else in the market.  Till now, the deal-makers for buying a tablet were apps, software experience and price.  Based on the market reaction to the Retina display, it's safe to assume 'display' as another deal-maker and a strong differentiator - my first game changer.

2. Forget Macs, the iPad is your digital lifestyle strategy:
A decade ago, Steve Jobs started thinking about creating a content delivery model, envisaging all your content (i.e. pictures, music, movie rentals, TV shows, podcasts, books, etc.) centered around the Mac.  While this model has worked during the PC heydays, it doesn't work well in the 'post-PC' era - more on this in a bit... 

For the first time ever, the iPad ships with LTE (4th-gen ultra-fast mobile broadband technology, if you may) and mobile hotspot capability (i.e. WiFi access points), Verizon only, at this point.  What this is means is if you've picked up the iPad Retina with a data plan contract, you can tether up to 5 devices to access the high-speed internet at 4G speeds.  In US, ATT has made the iPad an exception (non-iPad tablets still get throttled) to it's recent data throttling move - another first ever.

Think about the implications of this for a second - here's an uber-popular tablet with desktop-like broadband speeds and the ability to tether up to 5 devices.  What this means is that in an instant, Apple could potentially replace your internet service provider at home and become one.  No more complicated routers / modems setup and installation required, no more messy cables.  No customer likes to get into this unless they have to.  

"Technology ceases to be complex and cumbersome the moment it becomes simplistic and invisible to an average user, thus enforcing a change in existing usage models and making them more elegant"

With the iPad Retina, Apple is sending out a clear message to the market - for an average user, the iPad is fully capable of replacing one's home media server or XBOX or any other solution in the market by elegantly storing all data on the cloud (via iCloud) and streaming / downloading content through the wicked fast LTE.  Elegance lies in simplicity.  As the iPad reaches more and more people, this will kick in a change in current usage case and eventually change the game.  It may sound a bit wierd right now, but remember people thought it was stupid to carry your songs on a flash drive till Apple came in and showed the world the iPod.  Touch-screen tablets were the scourge of PC industry before the iPad.            

3. "Thermonuclear war" with Google, but let's first decouple:
This was a tough one to see through but an important one.  We all know Apple and Google have had their share of differences due to Steve Jobs' belief about Google having leveraged Apple's idea of a touchscreen smartphone and the UI. 

"I will spend my last dying breath if I have to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.  I am going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product.  I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this." - Steve Jobs

Therein lies Apple's fundamental dislike for all things Google.  As part of the feature enabling users to tag their photos on a map, the new iPhoto app in the iPad Retina uses, surprise surprise, a non-Google Maps solution called OpenStreetMap (think of it as the Wikipedia of maps - all open source).  If this is a sign of things to come, I can expect Apple to move away more and more from Google services.  One of the core services that Apple (and rest of the industry) uses from Google is search.  Judging by the mood in Cupertino camp, it's not entirely impossible to imagine Apple positioning Siri as one's primary source for search.  And going by Google's last 10k filings, this is the place where it will hurt them the most since search forms the basis of their revenues.  Needless to say this is bound to change quite a few rules of the game, if it were to happen.

What do you guys think???  

P.S.: I've used 'iPad Retina' to describe the 2012 iPad on this story.  If the name sticks and starts trending on Twitter, you know where you heard it first (wink wink). 


Image source:http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5DpvYvs9wng/T2iXRVnL_YI/AAAAAAAAHKs/ZnikqbvB72w/s1600/image.jpg