Quote:
Originally Posted by dgatwood
Sorry you got hit by the early adopter penalty. That always sucks. Unfortunately, Apple didn't give it enough RAM or a fast enough CPU to really handle a screen of that size. On the original iPad, iOS 5 was sluggish; iOS 6 would have been unbearable.
Either way, IMO, it's really a numbers game. The iPad 1 market is probably only about half of the 1% of Apple devices running iOS 5, and the entire Apple market is probably no more than a third of your readers, so maybe a sixth of one percent. If you assume your time is worth... say $50 an hour, on average, and if you make... say $5 per copy sold, then the break-even point for spending an hour making it work is at 6,000 copies. By a year from now, the break-even point will probably be closer to 60,000 copies as the percentage of those devices in active use drops further through the floor.
And that's assuming you can even find an iPad 1 for testing. One of the biggest pains in the @$$ when dealing with iBooks is the fact that Apple doesn't ship a copy of iBooks in their iOS simulator. If you have to spend another $150 dollars to buy legacy hardware for testing, the break-even point for an hour's work becomes 24,000 copies, and in a year, the break-even point will probably be more like 240,000 copies. For most folks, those sorts of numbers don't make sense.
And they make even less sense if it takes time away from writing, because spending an hour working on a new book would likely give you a much bigger potential payoff.
Perhaps if there were a way that publishers could share test devices remotely, so that we could have a pool of devices running a wide range of iOS versions....
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Oh, believe me, I understand.
It's just that when it comes to Apple, they abandon EVERYTHING that blithely. OS'es, hardware, software...I have bupkus respect for them, in terms of customer support, and I absolutely won't drop another thou on them. I'll buy another iPad, as needs must, for the office, but it'll be bloody well used.
Hitch