Meanwhile, not a single company has come to market with a tablet that can match Apple on price, consistency, build quality, operating system, 3rd party developer support or user experience.
I mean, what are you looking for in iPad 2, exactly – a holographic display and unicorn-bone battery, driving a telepathic OS?
The hardware is impeccable, but nobody had any problem with the thickness of the first iPad and that's what they changed. They know their average consumer don't know all those things and functions like tabbed browsing, so they take advantage of it by not taking some of their time and budget to develop those functions. They take advantage of their market.
How can a consumer complain about something they don't know; they can. But they still have the right to fully understand what is available elsewhere and what functionality (that is quite crucial) they just decided to omit. Consumers have the right to know all these things.
Defending the product and just saying it is all nice and good means that it will stay that way. Criticizing and getting informed is what everyone should do in order to make good decision and keeping every new technology advanced and innovative not repetitive !
They changed substantially more than that:
- More RAM, so browsing and multi-tasking is better
- Faster processor, so apps launch faster
- Better graphics processor, so developers can make even prettier games or do crazy graphics transforms in realtime like PhotoBooth
- Cameras for video conferencing
- It's lighter, so it's easier to carry around
None of these things is trivial, but it's an incremental hardware upgrade. That's how Apple's cycles work: Major revisions every two years, incremental bumps in between.
Meanwhile, Apple's OS release schedule isn't coupled to its iPad release schedule. iOS 5 will be announced sometime in the next month, if the past is any indication.
Apple does better than anyone else at continually improving its software and making it available to previously-shipped devices. I doubt the iPad is going to be left in the cold.
Wow, you just complained that a company focuses on things most of their consumers care about while ignoring things most of their consumers don't care about.