In the beginning of September Jeremy Herrman wrote a short piece regarding the naming of the “new iPad.” When I first read it I smacked myself in the forehead thinking about how genius his reasoning was. Then I began wondering why I hadn’t thought of that myself even though it wasn’t something I would normally think of myself anyway. The premise of his article was that the reason for calling the new iPad simply “iPad” instead of “iPad 3” was that Apple would soon be releasing the iPad Mini/Air and it wouldn’t make sense in the long run to have, say, an iPad 6 AND an iPad Mini/Air 4. Basically Apple in typical fashion would make even the category names as simple as possible.
But I think the name simplification needs to go one step further. The original idea of the article was that only the number would get dropped, but there would still be two distinct product categories and therefore two distinct names (iPad and the iPad Mini/Air). I don’t think Apple is going to do that though. I think that there will be one line of just iPads.
Think about it. The differently modeled MacBooks Air and MacBooks Pro don’t have separate names. The 13-inch MacBook Pro isn’t called the MacBook Pro Mini and the same goes for the 11-inch MacBook Air. It would make much more sense to simply call all of the iPads just that instead of having subcategories of one device simply because of a few different specs. Were not talking major differences like those between the iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, and iPod Classic. We’re talking about a smaller and less pixel dense screen and that’s basically it. Yes it will probably have internal specs that are significantly different, but Apple isn’t a spec company. It’s an experience company. Why let a student think they are getting a lesser iPad (smaller, lesser, not as cool) simply because of them tacking an adjective at the end of it when you can simply make it so everyone gets the same iPad because they are all called “iPad.”
Post Script:
It probably wouldn’t hurt for that iPad picture on the front page of the online Apple store to go from reading “From $399,” to “From $199 (made up price).” I know when my mother went to purchase that MacBook Air a few months ago that read “From $999,” and began clicking around she ended up with the $1999 model… I’m just sayin’.
