Apple May Drop iPad Pricing, Suggests Analyst
An analyst has suggested that Apple executives could be “nimble” on pricing for the iPad tablet PC if it fails to achieve sufficient marketplace traction
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was reportedly in New York City on 3 February to discuss the iPad’s capabilities with high-ranking executives from The New York Times. Jobs, wearing what was described by New York magazine’s anonymous source as “a very funny hat,” apparently demonstrated the device for Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. over dinner at Pranna, a high-end restaurant near Madison Square Park.
The iPad’s price and competitive profile could also chance as the device adds more hardware and software features. According to rumour, Apple may be planning to integrate a camera into the device; fuelling this idea was a recent job notice posted on Apple’s corporate site for a Performance QA Engineer for its iPad Media division.
“The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks,” read the job posting. “Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.”
That employee will ultimately “be responsible for the development and maintenance of methodical testing strategies and accompanying test documentation,” as well as tracking bug reports and overall project progress.
The job posting follows earlier rumours that the iPad could include a built-in camera. In a 1 February posting on its official blog, Kansas-based Apple product repair company Mission:Repair mentioned that it had recently received spare parts for the iPad contained a space where a camera could potentially be inserted.
“We received our first shipment of iPad parts today,” Ryan Arter of Mission:Repair noted in that posting. “Upon opening them up and getting our hands on some of these rare items, we immediately noticed what appears to be a ‘spot’ for a camera within the iPad frame.”
The camera module from the unibody MacBook apparently fits into the frame received by Mission:Repair: “The lens fits in the hole, the LED that indicates that the camera is on fits, and the ambient light sensor hole is also correct. It appears that the plans to have camera in the iPad is a reality.”
The combination of that blog and Apple’s job posting gives more weight to the idea that a future version of the iPad will contain a camera, even though Apple’s official iPad page makes no mention of such a feature. However, Apple also has a history of integrating new hardware into subsequent versions of its devices; the iPod Nano, for example, now includes a built-in camera module in its most recent iteration, and previous rumors have suggested that the iPod Touch could also receive one at some undefined future point.
