People use iPads all the time now in situations they previously wouldn't have used a computing device.
I know of plenty of companies that have bought one just to easily demo stuff or to be able to do stuff in the field that they wouldn't have done earlier.
The iPad came out to wide acclaim because they got it right and showed it was possible. So many nay sayers saying even 6 months after release that it wouldn't be popular, it was a tiny market. It's very easy to reinvent history but I remember the crunchpad/joojoo coming out before the iPad, and it got panned everywhere even though many of us wanted a big screen iPhone.
Let's make an electric car is on the same level of innovation as lets make a bigger iPhone. Both had already been thought of a decade before, both had already been tried before, both had already had failed entrants that made no money and it turns out they were actually both pretty large technical challenges to do it well enough that the consumers would actually buy the product.
I would say they were in exactly the same league.
And lets not forget that Apple had already single handedly created the portable computing market in the first place with the iPhone.
Compare their total market value to the post-iPhone smartphone market and try saying that again with a straight face.
And that's exactly the point I'm trying to make, perhaps badly! Before the iPhone or the iPad people knew there was a market there. But they claimed it was tiny and not worth entering or putting serious R&D into. So you ended up with hobbyist/yuppie toys.
Say tomorrow someone unveils a 3D printer that does some essential household task and every house has one in 5 years time because you'd be crazy to not have an Initech Megamaker 3000! Were Initech the the first into the market? No! But they were the ones that turned it from a hobbyist thing into a real powerhouse multi-billion $$$ market. They single handedly grew the market by orders of magnitude, they saw the actual potential market.
Whatever comparatively miniscule market there was before the iPhone is a reminder of how easy it is to think too small. Just look at the Android preview before the iPhone came out! It was utterly rubbish. Google were thinking small.
I know of plenty of companies that have bought one just to easily demo stuff or to be able to do stuff in the field that they wouldn't have done earlier.
The iPad came out to wide acclaim because they got it right and showed it was possible. So many nay sayers saying even 6 months after release that it wouldn't be popular, it was a tiny market. It's very easy to reinvent history but I remember the crunchpad/joojoo coming out before the iPad, and it got panned everywhere even though many of us wanted a big screen iPhone.
Let's make an electric car is on the same level of innovation as lets make a bigger iPhone. Both had already been thought of a decade before, both had already been tried before, both had already had failed entrants that made no money and it turns out they were actually both pretty large technical challenges to do it well enough that the consumers would actually buy the product.
I would say they were in exactly the same league.
And lets not forget that Apple had already single handedly created the portable computing market in the first place with the iPhone.