My Thoughts

Did Apple Do Developers a Favor by Omitting the iPad Camera?

1.28.2010 | Mac OS X, My Thoughts, Stuff I Like!

If you aren’t living in a cave scribbling on a stone tablet, I’m sure you have heard that Apple announced a new addition to their product line today – the iPad. While the hype speculated many amazing advancements in computing and led many to believe there would be portrait and landscape docks as well as a front and user facing (flash) camera, the reality is that the product is underwhelming with its bare essentials.

However, did Apple do developers (and themselves) a favor by omitting the camera for this launch? Possibly… here are some thoughts:

  1. The iPad launched with iTunes, the App Store, and a new iBooks store – all for the purpose of selling media to the general public.
  2. Many publishers are eager to get on this train and many feel confident they can begin charging for content now that users will be consuming on this mobile device.
  3. By making the iPad’s price low enough for the general public and the UI simple to understand, Apple may hope to attract a new target market; older people with disposable income who like to read print newspapers, books and print magazines.
  4. Adding a camera or two would have increased the cost of production – and having the camera would have distracted users from opening their wallets and buying electronic media.
  5. By omitting the camera, Apple may push some of the gadget geeks who already own iPhones and iPod Touches towards version 2 of the iPad. In the meantime, new iPad owners and users new to Apple products would need to stock up on new paid apps instead of syncing already paid for apps from their other Apple mobile devices. All great news for the bottom line!

Ultimately, the iPad is meant to be a secondary family device with its primary purpose used for consuming paid media. With no multi-tasking or a camera to distract users from video conferencing, taking pictures or making short movies; users are only left with the option to browse the stores and to buy stuff from them. (This is a page out of Zynga/Farmville’s business plan: design something lackluster so that users can fix/patch the problem by adding money to make it more interesting.)

While the hardware may be a disappointment for many of the Mac fanbois and gadget geeks, iPhone/iPad developers may certainly benefit by selling more apps and making more money. Perhaps once Jobs can prove that a marketplace within the walled garden is better than its competitors, it will open up other features to promote new types of apps.

What do you think? As a developer, does the new iPad make you more eager to want to tap into this market?

  • I think it actually made the world more difficult for developers. Things you could previously assume would work for all of your users (like GPS and Camera) will not work for a good subset of them. Expect lots of "doesn't work" 1-star reviews on apps that the iPad can't fully support (see any app with voice input functions reviewed by 1st Gen iPod touch users).
    Further, though iPhone apps run, they look awful (regular or double size). So any serious app developer needs to now design, build and test 2 different user interfaces in the same app.
    Sure, there's more opportunity to sell apps, but that's not coming for free.

    Also expect lots of copycat apps to be built for iPad only before the original developer can ship an update. I expect lots more app store noise.

    But I don't personally ship any iPhone apps, so I could be wrong.
  • I haven't developed a game recently but are developers still using pixels vs. vector graphics? I would think many would be using vectors by now - which would mean things could potentially scale up w/o it looking too bad.

    I guess I should further clarify the question: Did Apple do content providers and game developers a favor by omitting the camera?
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