Home economics and the iPad (and then I’m done)
Oikos (οἴκος) meaning “House + Nemein (νέμω) meaning “To manage”
One of the things the iPad debate is missing is consideration of household and customer decision-making. Many of the conversations out there ask legitimate questions about whether the iPad meets real needs well. Other conversations have legitimate points about how it’s an important step in improving human computer interactions even if the need isn’t clear. What’s missing, and I think this is an interesting design discussion, is how people make high consideration purchases.
One of the biggest mistakes in the discussion is likening the iPad to the iPhone or iPod. Both the iPhone and the iPod were entries into well-established categories — mobile phones and portable music (I’m thinking Walkmans here, not MP3 players). Both categories had known pain points. For the phone there were crappy interfaces, the number pad as input device, and for me the miserable voice mail systems. For the music players there was the tradeoff between how many songs you had with you and how heavy/cluttered your bag would be (Walkman and Discman), or what a pain in the neck it was to get music onto your MP3 player. Apple walked into a known category which was serving known needs poorly and addressed pain points within it. For consumers already inclined to spend their money in this space, Apple’s premium price point wasn’t a problem — and millions gladly paid for the superior product.
The iPad purchase decision, however, happens in a different space - One in which people aren’t already spending money in the category to meet their need or where they are meeting their needs in other ways that don’t particularly suck. The not particularly sucking is important:
- books and eReaders work fairly well
- game consoles and portable game devices work extremely well (I’m gonna ignore the various rings of death on the XBox)
- people have TVs and iTouches for watching stuff and they work well
(Netbooks kind of suck and web browsing on a laptop often sucks, so Apple has an insight there, though it’s not clear that the iPad is really a tablet or netbook competitor.)
This is a pretty weak set of impulses to buy a high-price device. The urgency for the purchase of the iPad is much less than the iPod (I need to have my tunes in my bag! at the gym, in the car, at the office!) or the iPhone (I hate my phone; I don’t want to carry an iPod, a camera, and a phone). Lots of momentum and lots of day-to-day justification to drop some real coin in the phone and music player category . . . but where’s the energy for a mass audience on the iPad? I don’t see it — changing the way we compute is pretty tepid for something that’s more than half a thousand dollars — with which you can buy an XBox and best-selling titles, a good digital camera, a good netbook, a flat screen tv in the bedroom. It’s also a nice sum not to spend at all.
Put this decision in the context of a semi-affluent, or non-affluent household. Think of a family where money decisions of this size are made by two people and against larger issues like mortgages, tuition, college savings, car payments, etc. That person is spending $500 for . . . what?
Add to that, the number of devices already present in someone’s home:
- a flat screen TV
- a gaming console (that may be netflix-enabled)
- a desktop computer and/or a laptop
- a mobile phone and/or an iPod touch
- a DVD player that plays Hi-Def and may be netflix enabled
Hard to see how this conversation ends in a purchase: Honey, I want something for games that are bigger than my DS, but not as big as my TV. Darling, lets drop $500 so we can watch TV in bed on this thing (which I’ll need to buy a stand for) instead of the laptop or the TV. But sweetie, I need a bigger media screen for movies on the subway, my Touch doesn’t cut it.
In grad school, I loved when Robert Heilbroner would remind people of the origins of the word economics — household management. Managing the household is something we still do, but as marketers or product designers we tend to ignore the larger household in which a purchase decision is made (at least those marketers or product designers participating in the iPad frenzy). I think it’s an interesting design question and might make me feel less small-minded as I repeat that the iPad will sell well as a web appliance, but it won’t be much bigger than the Apple TV.
[…] And what a great writer Steven Johnson is. I’ve been scribbling in my notebook, in evernote and two blog entries (this’n and this’n here) to get this idea across: The iPhone revolutionized smartphones, but I think we all accept that smartphones were in our future. There is no equivalent consensus that tablets or couch computers or casual computers are inevitably on the road ahead. We don’t even agree on the aims here: Is the iPad replacing the laptop or supplementing it? […]
OK, so obviously I didn’t read this post before your latest.
All good points, but you can look at these types of things through many lenses.
A couple of other tidbits for thought …
When the original iPod was introduced in 2002, our semi/non-affluent households had to make the jump from a sub-$100 walkman to a $400 mp3 player … and for how many kids in the house? How many had to buy computers to sync their music?
Those same households (who now have digital cameras and mp3 players) are now doubling their mobile phone bill (per person) for a consumer smartphone.
We’re now spending 3 to 10 times as much money on TV’s that last us a fraction of the time. Three times as much on cameras.
I’m not disagreeing with your point about an easier transition to spending on these devices because they’re not new categories … but dropping $2K on a TV … that I’ll likely have to replace in a few years. That’s hard to swallow.
I think that out of the gate sales will be lack luster … but as Apple adds more services to the device (publishers, studio partnerships) and has more entry level options (lower prices). More and more people will start to bite. Again, think about all the other companies that are pushing their tablet devices too. These things will hit their turning point.
Fair points all. I still think the iPod and iPhone are bad analogies in this space: they exist in a category that has proven its worth, wormed its way into our lives as a critical devices, and which had pain points Apple products solved — iPad solves more abstract problems in a space that doesn’t exist (it’s really not a tablet).