Apple had a major iOS event yesterday, the first since Steve Jobs passed away. According to VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell, it showed a brand unravelling. And there was me going “oooh, new iPad”. What a fool I am, right, Jolie O’Dell?

While today’s Apple event unveiled a couple new improvements to an expected lineup of products, it also revealed a certain sloppiness that was absent from former, Steve Jobs-led launches.

A couple of new improvements, if you’re not being sloppy while writing about Apple being sloppy.

This wasn’t anything major, just a few minor but glaring inconsistencies: Tim Cook going for the “rumpled executive” look in an untucked shirt,

Tim! Don’t be yourself! Wear the same as Steve did, you you will unravel the brand! Aieee!

the ambiguous naming of the “new iPad,” (not iPad 3 or iPad HD),

That would never have happened under Steve Jobs. Well, apart from the iPod touch. And the Apple TV. And the iMac. And the MacBook. And a bunch of other Apple products. But ignoring all those, the brand is unravelling! Aieee!

the use of a truly horrible pun on a new product’s landing page,

Something that Apple would never have done under Steve Jobs and his watchful glare. Well, apart from calling the iPod touch the ‘funnest iPod ever’. And mangling grammar with ‘think different’. And myriad other awful puns that peppered Apple’s press releases and website since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the 1990s.  But ignoring all those, the brand is unravelling! Aieee!

and finally, the tie-dyed Apple logo at the presentation’s conclusion.

Blue Dalmatian iMac. Flower Power iMac. Remember those? They were approved by—drumroll—Steve Jobs! That said, what was wrong with the logo? It was relevant for the event and also a nice nod to the striped one designed by Rob Janoff.These are not the kinds of things I normally care about. They have nothing to do with hardware and nothing to do with technology.

Apple’s ethos is about so much more than hardware and technology: It’s supposed to be, as this outsider sees it, about aspiration, dreams, desires, the future, even Utopia. In a word, it’s only 30 percent about the tech and 70 percent about the branding.

That’s right! Let’s ignore the technology, because that’s irrelevant. Let’s instead concentrate on Tim Cook’s shirt. Let’s ignore the details of what Apple unveiled (a spiffy new iPad, say) and suggest APPLE IS DOOMED because of… a colourful Apple logo.

I think today’s Apple event shows that perfectionism fraying a bit around the edges. The bad pun, the goofy logo, the weird product name — all of it pointed to a leadership that either didn’t understand or didn’t care about consistency in iconography.

All of it pointed to a leadership that was pretty much going for ‘business as usual’. There are things I see in Apple now that are different. For example, I was surprised to see Apple go with LTE when it’s fragmented and not available in many countries. But consistency in iconography? Really?

[…] nomenclature was consistent enough to become one of the most hotly speculated-about features of any launch. Would it be called the iPhone 2? The iTablet? The iPhone 5 or the 4S? The 4SG? Think about how little anyone cares about the name of HTC’s next smartphone or Google’s next bit of software, and you’ll see how important that one small detail of nomenclature was to Apple’s iconic position in the world of tech and consumer brands.

Think about the shitstorm that ensued when Apple went for iPhone 4S instead of iPhone 5. For half of the world’s tech pundits, it was like the world had ended. Ultimately, names do matter, but when you’re creating an iconic product, do version numbers matter any more? To suggest that Apple gave no thought to renaming its tablet ‘iPad’ is absurd, especially if it’s going to continue with an annual refresh. Imagine the product line continues a decade into the future—is ‘iPad 12’ going to look like a great thing, or would people just be saying “enough already”, like they do today with software upgrades?

Today’s event and the tiny but glaring inconsistencies bring up the impossible-to-answer question: Would Steve have green-lit that?

I think he would. But, more importantly, one of the things Steve Jobs reportedly told his team was that they should do what they think is right, not second-guess him. If Apple suddenly nose-dives because of a colourful logo or untucked shirt, fair enough. I’ll phone up Jolie O’Dell and ask for advice on lottery numbers. But here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s going to.

Summing up Apple’s event, the new iPad has:

• A Retina display (2048 x 1536)
• Cameras like the ones in the iPhone 4S (including 1080p video)
• Optional LTE (and worldwide 3G as back-up)
• Voice dictation
• Serious technical grunt to push all those high-res graphics
• The same price tag
• The same battery life

Apple has also:

• Released a new 1080p Apple TV for the same price as the old model
• Updated its iPad apps for the Retina display
• Released iPhoto for iPad, which looks really lovely
• Kept the iPad 2 for a low-end model

So, here’s what I predict idiots are going to mostly write about:

• The name (just ‘iPad’, with no version number)
• The slight increase in weight and thickness
• The lack of additional storage
• The LTE fragmentation
• The lack of a price drop
• The lack of a smaller model
• Features in one or two Android tablets that no-one really gives a crap about

If you’re in the idiot camp, please go and watch this before spewing your word vomit all over the internet. Thanks.

Note: I’m not saying here that the new iPad is perfect. I would have liked to have seen more storage, and I think until the iPad 2 vanishes, the new naming convention has the potential to confuse customers. However, the tech press has a habit of banging on about small negatives when it comes to Apple, sidelining the big positives. Personally, I think everyone else in the industry now has a massive challenge to compete with Apple’s revised iPad.

My predictions about the iPad 3/iPad HD event and subsequent coverage:

• The new iPad will, objectively, be a decent upgrade regardless of what Apple adds to it.
• Immediate coverage will be mostly subjective, based in part on what Apple ‘left out’, despite never giving any indication such things were going to be added anyway.
• Apple will be slammed in the press for not including features that were dreamed up by hacks misinterpreting a single invite and trying to get hits with IPAD 3 CONFIRMED TO WARP SCREEN JUST LIKE T1000 headlines.
• A few sensible people will note that the update looks “pretty good actually”.
• Said people will be slammed as Apple fan-boys.
• The tech press will spew out a vomit of articles, explaining that the new iPad will be a sales disaster and 2012 will now be the year of the Android tablet.
• The new iPad will not be a sales disaster.
• 2012 won’t be the year of the Android tablet.
• 2013 will then roll around and we can all repeat the same bullshit yet again. HURRAH!

Google:

Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play.

Google creating a media hub to compete with iTunes is smart. Google too often fires out numerous projects and they rarely mesh and gel. To be competitive when it comes to stuff you can shove on to a device, centralising everything makes a lot of sense. But Google Play? It’s an odd piece of branding. Apple’s ‘App Store’ and ‘iTunes Store’ are pretty dry but they’re also balanced brands used as a container for disparate things. With Google, however, you get:

Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks

You ‘play’ songs—fair enough. And music is fundamentally a leisure activity. There’s also the well-known play icon, so the brand works well here.

Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games

Fair enough for games, but for apps? I’m not thinking ‘play’ when I use iA Writer, Brushes or many of the other productivity apps on my iPad. It seems strange to use ‘play’ as a descriptive word for housing Android’s apps.

Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks

Do you ‘play’ a book? Reading is typically split between education and leisure, and ‘play’ is often very much the wrong word for the former.

Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

This works similarly to songs, in the sense that you ‘play’ movies, although it’s easy enough to argue that this isn’t necessarily the best branding for movies that are research- and education-oriented.

I realise I’m overthinking this and many people simply won’t care nor think much about Google’s brand for its centralised resource for downloading apps and media; but to me the brand smacks of something that would be used for entertainment purposes only, and it isn’t suitable for apps that aren’t games and books/movies that aren’t primarily intended for fun.

EDIT: Sam Radford on Twitter makes an excellent point:

Though iTunes makes no sense for buying books, apps, movies, games, magazine, etc.

Of course, iTunes itself has mushroomed from an MP3 player into a media hub, but he’s right that the branding no longer makes sense—and it hasn’t for a while. Perhaps, then, it’s more about what we’re used to, in which case Google’s challenge will be in ‘training’ people to realise that Google Play encompasses everything—not just leisure apps and media. (Mind you, Google’s other challenge, judging by its past, will be in sticking with something for the long-term, too, and not axing/reworking its offering on a whim.)

Vlad Savov, reporting for The Verge:

Acer Global President Jianren Weng has been quoted at CeBIT today reiterating something he said at the beginning of December: ultrabooks will drop to the crazy-low price of $499 in 2013 and compete directly against Apple’s iPad.

Wow. That’s pretty bold. I guess the ultrabook thing’s worked out great for these guys, and they’re making money hand over fist, in order to make such dramatic price-cuts!

Speaking with Christoph Pohlmann of Acer’s laptop team, we learned that the current $799 / €699 price for the Aspire S3 is too low for Acer to actually generate any profit from it. The company is merely breaking even when selling its entry-level ultrabook model and the venture is only made worthwhile by the higher-specced SKUs pulling in a surplus.

Oh.