The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness : Cheerful

> ## the “of course” model of innovation diffusion > > People won’t buy a product if they can’t understand it immediately. They can’t understand it immediately if their worldview doesn’t already have a readymade place for it. And their worldview won’t have a readymade place for it, if they’ve never seen anything like it before. > > Steve expertly wields the powerful tool that is *the feeling of recognition.* > > That feeling tells us, *hey, I’ve been here before, and good things happened, and people were nice to me*. Recognition is a poor man’s wisdom. It helps people decide whether to buy. Without recognition, they won’t even entertain the question. > > So, because one Steve is worth a zillion other CEOs, Apple paves the way to the future by giving us devices we can understand today, in order to create more revolutionary (but still recognizable) devices tomorrow. > > Do you doubt that the iPod was laying the groundwork for the iPad all along? That final question is what I’ve been pondering all weekend. Way back when Apple dropped its best-selling iPod to date, the iPod mini, and launched the iPod nano as its replacement, most of us thought it was a bold, risky move that merely fed into Steve’s obsession with making iPods smaller. [Saturday Night Live even did a sketch about it. ](http://www.myvideo.de/watch/417313/IPod_Invisa)

But the real motivation there, it seems in hindsight, was not so much about having a smaller iPod, but to move Apple’s devices in general towards Flash storage, and more importantly, away from hard drive storage. Try to picture an iPhone with a portable hard drive, instead of Flash memory. Or even the iPad.

Flash RAM prices were far too high at the time to offer large capacities in consumer devices. The entire iPod nano’s existence, then, served as a tool for accelerating the drop of RAM prices over time. Apple took its best-selling product, and turned it into a driving force for future products. Talk about a risk.

Rather than continuing to sell what already worked, Apple made a drastic change that seemed completely unimportant to the average consumer at the time (retaining familiarity, as the above article suggests), but paved the way for the devices of the future.

The iPad would not be possible today at the current price point if it hadn’t been for the nano. And Apple was already thinking about the iPad that long ago.

If you think that’s easy, or that it’s commonplace in the business world to have that kind of foresight, you haven’t been to many design meetings at other companies. Trying to convince a CEO that your top-selling device needs to be dropped in order to prepare for the devices you want to sell in five years is next to impossible at most places. Most people say ‘if it ain’t broke…”

Skate to where the puck is going, indeed.