Apple's new iPad ad campaign promotes 300,000 apps "for everything you love"
Apple has introduced a new billboard ad campaign touting not just the iPad and iPad mini, but drawing particular attention to their shared library of 300,000 apps, a notable departure from the ads of Samsung and other tablet vendors.
Apple's initial ad campaign for the new iPad mini simply presented it next to the full size iPad both playing a duet in GarageBand, or alone in a user's hand to highlight its smaller size.
The new ads present both a full size iPad and iPad mini, depicting both running one of a series of creative applications. Each ad has a simple headline that highlights a particular category or type of apps, such as "Ear Opening" for music related titles, "Elementary" for educational titles, "Well Versed" for music notation and ebooks and "Mind watering" for visually graphic apps.
The new ads draw attention to Apple's strong software lead ahead of Android, Windows Phone, Samsung's Bada, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.
While Apple's iPhone and iPad ads have focused on their functionality, ad from Samsung have typically portrayed the company's Galaxy products as capable of depicting a dandelion or similar static image, or call attention to hardware features such as the Note's bundled stylus to scribble on top of a static image. Other Android products are typically pictured in advertising at their home page of icons similar to the iPhone.
Amazon's recent Kindle Fire HD ads portray the device alongside an iPad, with both swiping through a series of static photos rather than running any actual software. The spot then asks viewers if, based on looking at a static display of images, they notice a difference in the two apart from their price.
At the time, Jobs could boast 350,000 App Store titles, 65,000 of which were optimized to "take full advantage of the iPad," drawing attention to "consumption apps, creation apps and fantastic games, and a lot of apps for business and vertical markets apps like medical. The things people are doing here are amazing," he said.
Today there are over 775,000 App Store titles, 300,000 of which are specific to iPad. At the launch of iPad 4 and iPad mini last October, Apple's head of product marketing Phil Schiller drew special attention to the "night and day" difference between tablet-optimized iPad apps and the stretched smartphone apps that work on Android tablets (above, TripAdvisor on both).
Apple's initial ad campaign for the new iPad mini simply presented it next to the full size iPad both playing a duet in GarageBand, or alone in a user's hand to highlight its smaller size.
The new ads present both a full size iPad and iPad mini, depicting both running one of a series of creative applications. Each ad has a simple headline that highlights a particular category or type of apps, such as "Ear Opening" for music related titles, "Elementary" for educational titles, "Well Versed" for music notation and ebooks and "Mind watering" for visually graphic apps.
The new ads draw attention to Apple's strong software lead ahead of Android, Windows Phone, Samsung's Bada, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.
While Apple's iPhone and iPad ads have focused on their functionality, ad from Samsung have typically portrayed the company's Galaxy products as capable of depicting a dandelion or similar static image, or call attention to hardware features such as the Note's bundled stylus to scribble on top of a static image. Other Android products are typically pictured in advertising at their home page of icons similar to the iPhone.
Amazon's recent Kindle Fire HD ads portray the device alongside an iPad, with both swiping through a series of static photos rather than running any actual software. The spot then asks viewers if, based on looking at a static display of images, they notice a difference in the two apart from their price.
Apple targets apps as differentiator
Steve Jobs took a harsher tone in deriding competing tablets' scant app capabilities, noting at the release of iPad 2, just after the debut of Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb, that there were "at most 100 apps" for it. In reality there were only about 17.At the time, Jobs could boast 350,000 App Store titles, 65,000 of which were optimized to "take full advantage of the iPad," drawing attention to "consumption apps, creation apps and fantastic games, and a lot of apps for business and vertical markets apps like medical. The things people are doing here are amazing," he said.
Today there are over 775,000 App Store titles, 300,000 of which are specific to iPad. At the launch of iPad 4 and iPad mini last October, Apple's head of product marketing Phil Schiller drew special attention to the "night and day" difference between tablet-optimized iPad apps and the stretched smartphone apps that work on Android tablets (above, TripAdvisor on both).
Comments
The thing, though, is that it's not quantity of apps. If Android had fewer apps but BETTER ones, it would still be a huge point in Android's favor. But iOS apps aren't just larger in choice, they're better in quality.
I keep asking, but Android users cannot deliver: [B]give me a list of Android-only killer apps--not little utilities and system customizations (neat though they may be) but real serious productivity apps,[/B] like ArtRage, GarageBand, Procreate, Inkpad, Pages, Numbers, iMovie, Keynote, Textastic, iDraw, iTunes U, OmniGraffle, iPhoto, Bento, Omni Outliner, ArtStudio, NanoStudio, Diet Coda, Intaglio, Freeform, TouchUp, iTeleport, ReBirth. All of these are iOS exclusive. (Along with plenty of awesome smaller utilities like Dark Sky, and for a time, Instagram. Late is better than never, of course.)
Where are apps like these that are Android exclusives? Not, "well, here's SOME kind of app for this," but a truly top-level (and tablet-optimized) experience with that same level of power, ease and productivity?
If Android's list of truly excellent, powerful apps is smaller than iOS's then what else matters? A tablet or smartphone is only worth what you can DO with it. (What you can customize about the OS screens that you see when NOT using any app is worth something... but not as much apps.)
(I am now prepared for Android users to ignore my actual question and instead list their favorite little utility or system hack
It's a no brainer really. Anybody looking for a good mobile device with the most and best content has to choose iOS. Everything else is so far behind it's a total joke.
Many developers don't even give a crap about Android. They are ignoring it completely, as it would be a huge waste of time and money for them.
It makes as much sense to invest in an Android device today as it made sense to buy a betamax machine in 1985. In each case, you would be putting your money on the losing horse.
nagromme: You missed a bunch. Just in the music area alone we've got: Animoog, iMS-20, iPolySix, Magellan, Figure, Wolfgang PPG Wavegenerator and Wavemapper, Sunrizer, BeatMaker 2, Auria, Audiobus, Multitrack DAW and a bunch I know I've forgotten.
Shh! Google wants you to tone that down. Or else they'll cut you. /s
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][
It makes as much sense to invest in an Android device today as it made sense to buy a betamax machine in 1985. In each case, you would be putting your money on the losing horse.
Hmm…You might want to rephrase your analogy. As I understand it, Betamax was the technologically superior product but lost out to VHS because VHS was popularized by the porn industry as the tapes and players were cheaper.
Quote:
Originally Posted by waybacmac
Hmm…You might want to rephrase your analogy. As I understand it, Betamax was the technologically superior product but lost out to VHS because VHS was popularized by the porn industry as the tapes and players were cheaper.
Betamax did live on as a pro format, but it died as far as a consumer format was concerned. Betamax may have been superior, but VHS had certain advantages too, such as longer tape times I believe. Ultimately, the consumers who ended up buying Betamax machines eventually lost out, because VHS completely took over and thrived for a very long time.
Android is a technologically inferior OS of course, and I also believe that their eco system is doomed to fail. I agree with you that Betamax was the better quality system vs VHS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][
It's a no brainer really. Anybody looking for a good mobile device with the most and best content has to choose iOS. Everything else is so far behind it's a total joke.
Many developers don't even give a crap about Android. They are ignoring it completely, as it would be a huge waste of time and money for them.
It makes as much sense to invest in an Android device today as it made sense to buy a betamax machine in 1985. In each case, you would be putting your money on the losing horse.
And buying a Microsoft RT tablet today would be like buying a Betamax machine in 2013.
Now, if only Apple would goose up the capability of its iWork apps...
What proportion of Android Users are happy with re-scaled phone Apps versus those that want the true tablet experience?
As was mentioned by another poster, where is Android's equivalent to say, Garage Band?
Where is their killer App? Where the hell is it ?
I don't know about the porn factor, I believe it was Sony's failure to license to anyone but Sanyo that doomed Betamax.
It was far superior to VHS, both in picture quality and especially in the tape loading and transport mechanism. That it lost out to VHS is one of the great crimes in consumer technology of the last century. Sony blew it. It may be what caused them to lose their focus until the present day, even though they managed to dominate the pro video recording market.
Not a good analogy to the Android vs. iOS situation. In terms of the "open" vs. "closed" formula that Google used to yammer about, VHS would correspond to Android and Betamax to iOS. That leads us nowhere, because we see that Apple has opened iOS wide open to developers, as long as they play by the rules. Android has too few rules and not enough focus on quality.
If Apple can maintain their mind share and market share by staying focused on quality, it will go a long way toward making up for the Betamax debacle. For Android to "win" over iOS, it would repeat the crime of Betamax's loss. Unthinkable. I think it may have been around this fulcrum of quality vs. sheer numbers that Steve Jobs was driven nuts about Android, and rightly so.
I wonder if he was a Betamax holdout. A lot of us were for years, long after the battle was lost.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][
Betamax did live on as a pro format, but it died as far as a consumer format was concerned. Betamax may have been superior, but VHS had certain advantages too, such as longer tape times I believe. Ultimately, the consumers who ended up buying Betamax machines eventually lost out, because VHS completely took over and thrived for a very long time.
Android is a technologically inferior OS of course, and I also believe that their eco system is doomed to fail. I agree with you that Betamax was the better quality system vs VHS.
Does Android have an eco system? I think that is their biggest flaw. Regardless of what carrier or brand of phone there is no consistency in how you sync and manage music data. video, and so forth. I am not sure Android will fail......i think some flavor of it will live on. But that is just MHO......
Quote:
Originally Posted by waybacmac
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][
It makes as much sense to invest in an Android device today as it made sense to buy a betamax machine in 1985. In each case, you would be putting your money on the losing horse.
Hmm…You might want to rephrase your analogy. As I understand it, Betamax was the technologically superior product but lost out to VHS because VHS was popularized by the porn industry as the tapes and players were cheaper.
Yeah, that wasn't a great analogy to use.
They have apps but there are little no control over the app ecosystem. The most controlled Android app ecosystem is from Amazon with their forked version of the OS. I think that certainly helped propel Android adoption but if they don't reign it in it could grow uncontrolled and way they don't want it to much like a cancer.
I think they also need more standardized HW so they can have a rich accessories market. Remember the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, without the 3.5mm headphone jack? It had an ExtUSB jack.
"Mind watering". I like that.
Does Apple list the apps shown in the ads anywhere?