Infographing the cost of iPad
Mar 31, 2010
The cost of the iPad gets the infographics treatment here.
I feel a little weird about featuring this item. Helen E., who created the chart/poster, urged me to write about it. The link seems to connect to a commercial site but doesn't look too commercial -- and since the iPad fever is upon us, I thought why not.
There are two elements on this poster that qualify it as data graphics.
The surreptitious blue bars that are sized to match the inflation-adjusted prices... except for the Apple Lisa when the bar was chopped prematurely.
And the image equation gimmick at the bottom.
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The 43 iPads = 1 Lisa visualization is definitely effective. I'm not so sure if anyone should care about this particular comparison though.
The blue bars are a super, light touch on a chart that could be otherwise quite boring. The varying heights of the bars exaggerate the larger prices, and can cause confusion. For example, Apple III, costing $11,412.88, is a midget next to Macintosh Portable, costing $11,358.59.
The choice of which products to feature images and bolded text appears somewhat arbitrary... are those keystone products? Nice use of foreground/background though.
***
I sent a note back to Helen about the (ab)use of decimals, indicating that dropping decimals and rounding off to the nearest $10 would improve readability.
She replied, saying "moving forward, they will be a little cleaner without such a paranoid focus on accuracy".
She explained further:
We were really concerned with accuracy as we knew that the Apple fan base would be tough on us if our calculations were even a little out.
So legendary Apple fanboys, take your decimals with you on your way out!