There is a lot more to Tuesday’s introduction of a new version of iPad with 128GB memory by Apple.
The uninitiated simply dismissed the introduction of 128GB as nothing more than the evolutionary process of Apple adding more memory. Such commentators are myopic and are looking only at the consumer market as it exists today. The reality is that Apple’s introduction is a defensive move against an onslaught by Haswell in the corporate market.
iPad is the leader in the corporate market but the lead is in danger of slipping away to Haswell based devices. Haswell is the code name for an upcoming microprocessor architecture. Haswell will replace the currently popular Ivy Bridge architecture by Intel. Haswell is expected to come close to the ARM architecture by ARM Holdings used by Apple iPads.
Apple’s press release about the new iPad introduction made it apparent that the device was directed at the corporate market by extensively highlighting AutoCAD by Autodesk.
My research and analysis shows that the growth rate of the larger iPad in the corporate market is slowing. Part of the problem is that iPad does not run all of the software that corporations need. Most notable is Microsoft Office. Microsoft just launched Office 2013 without support for iPad.
How important is Office? Just take a look at these statistics:
- $24 billion in annual sales
- Over 1 billion emails a day
- Data in petabytes using Office
Microsoft will introduce Surface Pro based on Haswell and so will the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Dell…Read more at Forbes
