Many thanks to Author ‘Jian Cyrus Farhoumand’ for this brilliant article.
In January this year, Apple Inc. sold its two hundred and fifty millionth iPod – that’s 250,000,000 purchased since their introduction in 2001.
Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, subsequently stated in his Keynote speech in San Francisco this year, “iPods have changed 
the way we discover, purchase and enjoy music”. With more iPods sold than any other personal music player, and with the iTunes store being the most commonly used music download centre for said devices, Jobs is right – albeit rather smug. “We started Apple in 1976,” he continued, “34 years later we just ended our holiday quarter, our first fiscal quarter of 2010, with $15.6 billion of revenue.” The global annual sales for its fiscal year ending September 26, 2009 was US $42.91 billion.
Co-founded by Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Cupertino, California, Apple has grown into a global brand with 35,000 employees. Originally acclaimed for its Macintosh computers, and later the iPod, Apple intoduced a third paradigm-shifting device when it released the iPhone in 2007. 21,000,000 iPhones have now been sold. Furthermore, there are approximately 150,000 applications currently availaible for the iPhone in the App Store, of which there have been three billion downloads.
“Apple is a mobile devices company,” reiterated Jobs. “That’s what we do.” Apple’s three basic revenue channels are iPods, iPhones and Macs. These can all be categorised as mobile devices, including the Macs as the majority sold are laptops. Although Nokia and RIM (the makers of Blackberry) have sold more handsets globally, Apple now makes more money per quarter than any other mobile devices manufacturer. “By revenue,” Jobs continued, “Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world” – greater even than Sony or Samsung.
There is room for a fourth kind of mobile device however, Jobs pointed out; a machine that falls somewhere between laptop and smartphone but that would be better at email, web browsing and video streaming. It would need to be lighter and more portable than a laptop, yet have a more substantial screen than a smartphone. (The netbook, he claimed with disdain, is “not better at anything”.) Cue the grand unveiling of the iPad to excited whoops and cheers from a delighted audience. Rumours had long been circulating the net but Apple’s notorious secrecy combined with feverish customer loyalty meant that speculation was rife.
According to surveys conducted by J.D. Power, Apple has the highest brand and repurchase loyalty of any computer manufacturer. Fortune magazine named Apple the most admired company in the world in 2008, 2009 and 2010. A clue that new device designs were potentially in the pipeline may have been in Apple’s announcement in 2006 that it was expanding its 850,000 square feet campus headquarters in Silicon Valley to a second campus of fifty acres.
The iPad will be similar in functionality to the iPhone, running on the same OS (version 3.2), but with a larger 9.7-inch LED backlit screen with a pixel resolution of 1024×768, multi-touch functionality and longer lithium-polymer battery life. There will be two versions, one with Wi-Fi only and one with combined Wi-Fi and 3G. Each will come with a choice of three different memory storage capacities: 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes; weighing between 1.5 and 1.6lbs.
The iPad is hoped to reinvigorate the publishing business, with many publishers already rushing to create apps for their content. Apple’s iBookstore (similar to iTunes) will be the one-stop online shop for all books and magazines available to download directly to the iPad. Penguin, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times will all disseminate content to the iPad via the iBookstore or in app form.
The publisher Hachette, for example, has announced plans for a digital version of David Baldacci’s novel Deliver Us From Evil, including audio, video, photographs, deleted passages and even a new ending – all will be touchscreen interactive. The Financial Times app will be a free download but will have the same subscription requirements as FT.com. The app will be sponsored at launch by Hublot, the watchmaker, subsidising a two-month free access period, thereby illustrating the considerable interest from advertisers that the iPad has already created.
The Wi-Fi only iPad will be released first in the US on April 3rd at a cost of $499. The 3G version will follow later in the month. Both forms of iPad will become available in the UK simultaneously in late April. Steve Jobs said of the iPad: “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
