After months and even years of speculations and rumours, Apple has finally unveiled its much anticipated product yesterday, the iPad. For a product that is supposed to be the next big thing, to the degree where Steve Jobs even claimed it is the most important product he has ever done, the iPad received mixed feedbacks with the majority of people feel that the product fell short of their expectations.

We have seen iPad stories being covered pretty much everywhere by the media in the last few days (unless you have been living under a rock or too drunk to notice). Most stories discussed about the product’s shortcomings and the features that some feel should have been included in this first release, therefore it is redundant for me to go over those points again. However, most people fail to realize the reasons why Apple have decided to exclude those features and release what being considered as a supersized version if iPhone/iPod Touch.

At this point, I’m not really sure why it’s still a surprise to many that Apple typically releases an incomplete product just so they can add more features to it later on. Haven’t we all seen this before? It happened with the iPod, iPhone, and it is happening again, it should be all too familiar by now. People are crying that the iPad does not have a camera. Well, I am certain it is not rocket science for Apple to include a simple camera in the iPad, but why should they? After all, they can just quickly add a camera in later versions and call it “next generation”. The saddest thing is that people would still flock to the store and buy this new product like it has some sort of new revolutionary technology that can cure cancer. It’s a quick cash grab scheme that Apple has been using for years and there’s no real reason for them to stop as long as people still buy into it.

Another major weakness people complain is the lack of Flash support on the iPad. Ouch, for a device claimed to have the best web browsing experience and no Flash support? Guess what, Apple don’t care and honestly I don’t see them start supporting Flash any time soon. It’s not because they can’t, the reason is quite simple, people will stop buying games from the app store if they can just go on the web where there’s an unlimited amount of Flash games. Apple don’t care about user experience, actually let me take that back, they do as long as it won’t cut into their profit.

A lot of people also criticized the lack of an SD slot which prevents users from adding more memory to it. The cost of adding a memory slot is about $2 at the manufacturing level so we can eliminate the cost being an issue in this case. However, the problem associated with providing users the ability to add extra memory means it would destroy the price structure of the current iPad models. The iPad currently has 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB models. Each model is $100 more expensive than the one below it. In a business perspective, it would not make much sense for the iPad to include an SD slot that allows its users to add exact same amount of memory by themselves for merely $40 more.

All the above are the reasons why Apple is releasing an incomplete version of iPad with missing features. It’s obvious those decisions are purely driven by profit since any product released must be able to maximize the potential profit for its shareholders. However, I don’t think the investors are having too much confidence in this one as Apple’s stock went down 4% before going back up only 1% as soon as the iPad was announced. Analysts were quick to project that the product will sell approximately 1 to 5 million units in its first year. Those numbers are quite laughable since there is a huge difference between 1 and 5 million, and in my opinion any sale prediction at this stage is simply premature. The game cannot be decided until the ball starts rolling.