Fun with Graphs (take two)

I usually shy away from tearing apart the multitude of tech pundits who sensationalize the state of technology today and who purport their views as indicative of the entire consumer base when nothing could be further from the truth. But this time I wanted to address something as put out by the folks at ChangeWave and FierceWireless.

"New iPad Owners Like LTE but think it's too expensive"

This is the title used by FierceWireless to tease their article about the recent ChangeWave survey of new iPad (3rd gen) owners. The survey found that 82% of owners are "very satisfied" with their purchase while 0% were "very unsatisfied", 16% were "somewhat satisfied" and just 2% were "somewhat unsatisfied". When asked what they liked best, users were given 10 choices and told to choose no more than 3. The chart appears below.

If every respondent (there were 200) chose the maximum 3 items, the total percentages would add up to 300. As it stands, the total is 209%, which means on average people mentioned two things they liked best out of a possible three, by far the most popular one being the Retina Display.

They also asked users what they disliked most about the new iPad, this time offering 7 choices. Here's the chart:

Again the total possible amount is 300% since people were asked for up to 3 things they disliked most. The total percentage here is a paltry 85%, meaning that on average people had less than one thing to say when they were asked this question. Not only that, but asking people specifically for what they dislike leads them to call out things they wish were different, but doesn't imply that they are necessarily unhappy with the way things are. Not only that, but because people were given a list of possible answers, it's not clear how many respondents would have even mentioned the cost of LTE if they weren't specifically asked about it. I'm sure all new iPad owners would love it if LTE were free, but that's a far cry from people complaining about the cost.

Given the range of things that people were asked, is it really any wonder that the top two responses were related to costs? And also—the top answer was the price of the device itself which these people already paid! So given the sensationalism about LTE being too expensive (when less than a quarter of respondents mentioned it at all when specifically asked about it), we should also assume that the iPad itself is too expensive, which strangely doesn't appear anywhere in the original article.

So the take away here is that, no, iPad users by and large do NOT think that LTE is too expensive. In fact, most (76%) when asked what things they disliked most AND given the option "Cost of wireless data plan" still didn't mention it. And further, it appears the survey didn't even callout "LTE" specifically, so while that's clearly the service being referred to, it's disingenuous to assert that people are unhappy with the cost of LTE when that distinction was never made.

Be careful what you read, there's a lot of trash out there.