The iPad has gone on sale.

Day one sales seem to be about double the day one sales for the iPhone. Clicky

How on earth do Apple manage this? The product is either a dumb laptop or an expensive iPod depending on your take on it and yet it is selling like hot cakes. Apple seem to have done little by way of publicity or promotion. IIRC there was one press event and one pretty poor advert. Despite this it seems to be taking America by storm. The full (3G enabled) product is not even out there yet. What is going on?

Why does this not happen for Dell?

You have hardcore Apple fans who would buy a turd if it had an apple stamp. Apple attracts psychopaths.

Controversial. However you have not said why. Why Apple and not Dell or Asus?

Fashion.

Again, an interesting idea. However I though fashions changed pretty quickly. Also does Dell or Sony or perhaps companies like Alienware not produce fashionable tech?

I know I have seen fashion based ads from Dell.

Should have read fashionable brand rather than fashion.

I thought it was because the iPad is actually quite a good piece of kit.

Because they are not selling, in the main, to technically aware people. They are selling easy to use devices which, to the technically aware, are full of limitations, yet to those who don't care about file systems, DRM, which graphics processor is installed, it is simply an easy to use and good looking device.

It doesn't pretend to do everything, it has a core set of capabilities and it does those well, in an easy to use way that doesn't really challenge the user to have to learn about how a file system works, or how they transfer their data. They plug it into a computer, select the audio, books and videos they want to see on their device and they magically appear.

For the open source zealots, it is full of DRM. For the techno geeks, it doesn't allow them to explore the file system. For the majority of people in the middle of those two camps, it just works and works well...

It may well be. In fact I expect it is.

Is that all it is? Do other good bits of kit sell as well as this? To be a smash hit with little advertising spend do you just make a good bit of kit?

In that case, isn't it probably better not to upset them?

Jon

This did ring true for me. IIRC that is why the Wii sold so well too.

The fact that Dell or whoever wouldn't do as well as Apple even if it was the exact same piece of kit is the reputation they have in comparison to Apple.

OK, Apple have had a few bloopers. Some products didn't do well (Newton) some have bugs (current iMac displays) etc... but in the whole they are fairly quick to resolve them and for the most part the products do what they do very well. Mainly because they make both sides to match (i.e. software and hardware).

Companies like Dell have to manage with what Microsoft gives them and then find the parts that work as well as possible with the given software. They also don't necessarily put the same quality into the parts and the manufacture of their products so that they can be sold cheaper than the competition. As a result they will experience more faults down the line which then have to be sorted.

This is then compounded by the fact that if it's a Windows problem then Dell don't really have the responsibility to sort that as it isn't their product.

Add to this what Dave has said and that is why the iPad is selling well.

+1 to this.

If the insides of a computer actually interest you, Apple aren't actually interested in you. Why do you think they've spent years cultivating the slogan 'it just works'? Apple devices are tools, simple as that. Nobody gives a damn about how the blade of a screwdriver is bonded to the handle, they just want to unscrew things. Apple's kit is the same. 'Don't worry about what's inside, just get on with doing stuff'. if that ethos isn't yours, then you're wasting your time even looking at Apple stuff. Move along, nothing to see here.

The thing is, Dell would never create something like the iPad. At least not unless Apple did so first.

Apple are not like any other PC making company on earth. In fact, Apple are probably not like any other electronics company on earth, with maybe the exception of B&O. Every other PC maker is an engineering company first and a design company second. When they make a device they start from the numbers. What CPU will it have? How fast with the motherboard be? How powerful will we make the graphics chip? How big a hard disk will we put in it? Dell ask all these questions and then, when they have an answer that fits within a price range they want to sell a device at, they then say 'OK, how do we make it look nice? How do we make it easy for people to use?'. Now the answers to these latter questions may be good answers but the device isn't designed to those answers, because the design has already been constrained by the details they came up with first. The object's design is defined by the numbers, by the bits and pieces.

Apple patently don't work that way. No company that did would ever come up with a phone without a keyboard or a PC in a small plexiglass cube. To me it appears Apple start from the notions 'what will people want this to do' and 'how do we make it look nice? Apple is a company that starts from a design ethos, not an engineering ethos. Both approaches are valid of course and both produce devices that make our lives easier. However if you have an 'engineering brain' - which most techies do as they're used to dealing with quantitative things like numbers and yes/no answers - then you're going to struggle to see the point of Apple's devices because they were designed by brains that just don't work the way your brain does.