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There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple. Having said that, I'm of the opinion that most polls are use

There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple. Having said that, I'm of the opinion that most polls are useless, even more so if they're done by an analyst firm like Forrester. EDIT: On a side note, I wonder how many of the Facebookers lied about owning an iPad.

bad_user 16y ago
> There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple. When you're doing such an assertion, you also need hard numbers. Quite the contrary, my intuition says that most iPad owners do have an account on Facebook, but again ... I can't prove it. The real question ... is the chosen sample biased or not? ... and you can't answer with a yes/no just because the survey was done on Facebook, simply because the demographics of Facebook is pretty large and diverse (and for this assertion there is data available). > Having said that, I'm of the opinion that most polls are useless, even more so if they're done by an analyst firm like Forrester. That's because when doing statistics it's pretty easy to introduce bias ... but the error margin can be calculated ... by people knowing how to do their job of course. That said, electoral polls are pretty accurate in general with an error margin of +/- 1.5%, so many of them aren't useless.
- slantyyz 16y ago
  I am assuming people were asked to participate in this survey, and that the survey mentioned that it was for the iPad (I couldn't see any place where it was mentioned that it the topic of the survey was anything more generalized such as "portable computing devices"). Because opinions on the iPad were quite polarized, especially among the techies who felt like the iPad was too inflexible, I tend to think the opportunity to participate in such a survey created a self-selection bias for the so-called "independent geeks" and for the Apple fanboys who want to ensure that the outcome of any satisfaction survey yields a positive opinion score for the device. Those are the two groups who dominate in the comments sections of any blog post or news article about Apple products, so is it even surprising that the two dominant profiles are "Selfish Elites" and "Independent Geeks"?
  - bad_user 16y ago
    When you put it that way, you may have a point :)
  - mytype 16y ago
    This certainly would be a good point if it were true. In reality people come to MyType to take a personality quiz. We just randomly inserted the iPad question into the personality quiz for 20,000 people. They're not particularly savvy on technology, just the average Facebook user. We realized that as a personality typing application we have a very good platform for surveying any sort of opinion. Our user base is fairly reflective of the general US population, and none of them are coming to answer a survey about x. We plan to look at the personality traits that drive preferences in beer, politics, and much more. Subscribe to the blog if you haven't already :)
    - slantyyz 16y ago
      Fair enough. As I said, I "assumed" the details of how you invited participation in the survey, and you proved my assumption to be incorrect. I did look at your pie chart for the question, and it still doesn't strike me as a properly constructed interval type of question (are "think it's a silly product" and "don't care that much" mutually exclusive? I could agree with both statements). "It's a silly product" is also not the kind of phrasing you would use to get objective results. The survey probably would have benefited from additional questions. In any case, I'll stick to my original statement and say "take it with a grain of salt", as I would with the results of any poll.
- bandushrew 16y ago
  "The real question ... is the chosen sample biased or not? ... and you can't answer with a yes/no just because the survey was done on Facebook" yes, you can. it is clearly biased because (a) the sample was not randomly selected from the full set of iPad users and (b) the sample was a self-selected group of people who actively wanted to record their opinions on a general quiz. its not a random sample. hence it is biased. electoral polls, the ones that tend to be pretty accurate, work very hard to get a random sample. You did not.
dlsspy 16y ago
> There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple. Facebook has somewhere around 120 million active users in the US alone. The US has around 307 million active residents. 1/3 of the population of the US is on facebook. A good number of the remaining 2/3 probably don't have their own means to buy things (e.g. that includes nearly 60 million people who are too young to be eligible for a facebook account).
- slantyyz 16y ago
  You forgot about too old or tech-illiterate. I can't be the only person to have said "the iPad is the perfect device for my -insert older relative here-". And I would bet there's a significant portion of that segment isn't on Facebook. Don't forget that there's a percentage of Facebook users that are businesses, fake users, "employer friendly" duplicate accounts, and people who lie about their location. That's not counting people who lie about their demographic information, either. I don't doubt there's a large number of Facebook users, but you can't take everything at face value.
  - flatulent1 16y ago
    Years ago I read about a study that went on and on with interesting things about the people of Beverly Hills California. What the people doing the study hadn't figured out was that virtually everyone in it had made up their info and wasn't in Beverly Hills at all. In picking a ZIP code other than their own to use the first thing that came to mind was 90210, the name of a tv show.

bad_user 16y ago

> There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple. When you're doing such an assertion, you also need hard numbers. Quite the contrary, my intuition says that most iPad owners do have an account on Facebook, but again ... I can't prove it. The real question ... is the chosen sample biased or not? ... and you can't answer with a yes/no just because the survey was done on Facebook, simply because the demographics of Facebook is pretty large and diverse (and for this assertion there is data available). > Having said that, I'm of the opinion that most polls are useless, even more so if they're done by an analyst firm like Forrester. That's because when doing statistics it's pretty easy to introduce bias ... but the error margin can be calculated ... by people knowing how to do their job of course. That said, electoral polls are pretty accurate in general with an error margin of +/- 1.5%, so many of them aren't useless.

slantyyz 16y ago
I am assuming people were asked to participate in this survey, and that the survey mentioned that it was for the iPad (I couldn't see any place where it was mentioned that it the topic of the survey was anything more generalized such as "portable computing devices"). Because opinions on the iPad were quite polarized, especially among the techies who felt like the iPad was too inflexible, I tend to think the opportunity to participate in such a survey created a self-selection bias for the so-called "independent geeks" and for the Apple fanboys who want to ensure that the outcome of any satisfaction survey yields a positive opinion score for the device. Those are the two groups who dominate in the comments sections of any blog post or news article about Apple products, so is it even surprising that the two dominant profiles are "Selfish Elites" and "Independent Geeks"?
- bad_user 16y ago
  When you put it that way, you may have a point :)
- mytype 16y ago
  This certainly would be a good point if it were true. In reality people come to MyType to take a personality quiz. We just randomly inserted the iPad question into the personality quiz for 20,000 people. They're not particularly savvy on technology, just the average Facebook user. We realized that as a personality typing application we have a very good platform for surveying any sort of opinion. Our user base is fairly reflective of the general US population, and none of them are coming to answer a survey about x. We plan to look at the personality traits that drive preferences in beer, politics, and much more. Subscribe to the blog if you haven't already :)
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    Fair enough. As I said, I "assumed" the details of how you invited participation in the survey, and you proved my assumption to be incorrect. I did look at your pie chart for the question, and it still doesn't strike me as a properly constructed interval type of question (are "think it's a silly product" and "don't care that much" mutually exclusive? I could agree with both statements). "It's a silly product" is also not the kind of phrasing you would use to get objective results. The survey probably would have benefited from additional questions. In any case, I'll stick to my original statement and say "take it with a grain of salt", as I would with the results of any poll.
bandushrew 16y ago
"The real question ... is the chosen sample biased or not? ... and you can't answer with a yes/no just because the survey was done on Facebook" yes, you can. it is clearly biased because (a) the sample was not randomly selected from the full set of iPad users and (b) the sample was a self-selected group of people who actively wanted to record their opinions on a general quiz. its not a random sample. hence it is biased. electoral polls, the ones that tend to be pretty accurate, work very hard to get a random sample. You did not.

dlsspy 16y ago

> There are a lot of iPad owners not on Facebook, who are arguably a major market segment for Apple. Facebook has somewhere around 120 million active users in the US alone. The US has around 307 million active residents. 1/3 of the population of the US is on facebook. A good number of the remaining 2/3 probably don't have their own means to buy things (e.g. that includes nearly 60 million people who are too young to be eligible for a facebook account).

slantyyz 16y ago
You forgot about too old or tech-illiterate. I can't be the only person to have said "the iPad is the perfect device for my -insert older relative here-". And I would bet there's a significant portion of that segment isn't on Facebook. Don't forget that there's a percentage of Facebook users that are businesses, fake users, "employer friendly" duplicate accounts, and people who lie about their location. That's not counting people who lie about their demographic information, either. I don't doubt there's a large number of Facebook users, but you can't take everything at face value.
- flatulent1 16y ago
  Years ago I read about a study that went on and on with interesting things about the people of Beverly Hills California. What the people doing the study hadn't figured out was that virtually everyone in it had made up their info and wasn't in Beverly Hills at all. In picking a ZIP code other than their own to use the first thing that came to mind was 90210, the name of a tv show.