A post by Brian of London.
If only there was a serpent in the grass, this story would have everything needed for a biblical blockbuster.
In the beginning Man created the mainframes and PCs
Now the computers were formless and empty and hard to use and kept crashing a lot.
And Jobs said, “Let there be a small, but not too small, a bit bigger than a phone, computer thing with a touch screen” and there was the iPad™. And Jobs looked at it (and so did 500,000 other people in the first week), and saw that it was good.
And then a few dozen, maybe even a hundred, Israelis bought the things in America and flew back to Israel with them. Very soon after release, therefore, they started arriving in Israel. A few got through, some less than honest people, probably just carried them through the airport and “forgot” to declare them and pay the necessary 16%VAT. Other more honest people declared they had them, like Eve, immediately regretted their Apple.
The Ministry of Communications in Israel has (fairly arbitrarily) declared that this computer is different from all other computers. The first article about this was in Haaretz, but then the whole fiasco went world wide. By now 100’s of articles have been written about Israel banning the iPad supposedly because it’s WiFi meets US standards rather than European. One of the better articles is in the Wall Street Journal and is pretty much correct in the facts.
As I import a few hundred American specification Laptops per week into Israel this took me rather by surprise. As the youngest kid might ask naively at Passover dinner: “why is this slate different from all other slates?”
The tech blogs have covered this in huge detail and it really is a classic example of out of touch government agencies knowing not what they do. Some are linking this with the fact that Shimon Peres’s son owns the sole Apple import license but even I don’t think this is too likely. The whole system for bringing computer equipment containing radios into Israel is, to put it mildly, a big mess. The iPad has exactly the same WiFi/Bluetooth/FM chip as the iPod Touch and various other Apple laptops which are available here. Legitimate importers ask for permission to bring a particular type of chip, get a certificate and then declare on the import papers that such and such a computer has this type of WiFi for which permission is granted.
So to say that the WiFi doesn’t meet European standards is odd. Especially when it’s easy enough to download a document from Apple’s website giving all the European approvals for the iPad. Here are a couple of extracs:
As for me, my own iPad arrived in Israel legally declared travelling piggy back with a large number of other laptops and was either missed by customs or allowed through despite the ban. Of course VAT was paid for it.
What a fuss and this is really just a classic example of how Israel’s modern dynamic private sector is matched by an out of date, over burdensome socialist derived bureaucracy trying to justify it’s existence. Israel is likely to be a hot bed of development for the iPad as it has proved to be for the iPhone and the forward thinking Web 2.0 ideas that marry mobile computing and always on internet connections. Blocking Israel’s web developers from legitimately owning an iPad before the official importer can bring them is a bone headed move.
We will wait to see if anybody from the press manages to point out pages 4 and 5 of the iPad Product Information Guide to the Ministry of Communications here. It seems pretty clear to me that when Apple do start shipping the iPad to the UK, Germany and France, they’ve got all the right permissions in place to do it.
