Why the Tablet Market is Really the iPad Market 657
Hugh Pickens writes writes "James Kendrick writes that after Apple introduced the iPad, companies shifted gears to go after this undiscovered new tablet market but in spite of the number of players in tablets, no company has discovered the magic bullet to knock the iPad off the top of the tablet heap. 'What's happening to the 7-inch tablet market is what happened to the PC market several times. Big name desktop PC OEMs, realizing that consumers didn't care about megahertz and megabytes — yes, that long ago — turned to a price war in order to keep sales buoyant,' writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. 'Price becomes the differentiating factor, and this in turns competition into a race to the bottom.' Historically, when a race to the bottom is dictated by the market, it's more a sign of a lack of a market in general. If enough buyers aren't willing to pay enough for a product to make producers a profit, the market is just not sufficient. Price is a metric that most people know and understand because it's nowhere as ethereal or complicated as CPU power or screen resolution. Given a $199 tablet next to another for $299, the $100 difference in the price tag will catch the eye before anything else. But if price is such an important metric, why is the iPad — with its premium price tag — so popular? Simple, it was the first tablet to go mass market, and cumulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers. 'So the problem with the Kindle Fire — and the Nexus 7 — is the same problem that's plagued the PC industry. Deep and extreme price cuts give the makers no wriggle room to innovate,' writes Kingsley-Hughes. 'By driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations.'"
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:5, Funny)
"If that supermodel gives me a handjob, I'd gladly pay $100."
This is what you sound like.
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:5, Funny)
Apple fanbois are getting nervous.
As a long-time fan of Apple's work and devices, I can attest to being quite nervous about the Nexus 7. I mean, after the beating Apple's taken from the Galaxy Tab, the Xoom, the XYBOARD, the Nook, the Playbook, and the Kindle, I don't think they could withstand a gentle breeze, much less the Nexus 7 juggernaut currently bearing down on them.
Don't even talk about the terror that is the smartphone front; that keeps me up at nights with the chills.
How much beleaguering can one company take?
:D
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly why I picked up a HP Slate 500 for $350 when I got the chance. Few people understand what a killer app OneNote is.
I eagerly await the Surface Pro. It will be THE game changer in the corporate world, if not a significant segment of the consumer one. I can't help but laugh my ass off at every person with a functioning laptop or tablet, who is so woefully ignorant as to buy an ultrabook, Macbook Air, or iPad 3 since the Surface Pro was announced.
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:5, Funny)
shame about the battery li
Bully (Score:2, Funny)
Look this isn't fair. You are one of the few people who actually own both a selection of Android and iOS devices. Pick on someone with your own level of familiarity with the topic at hand ... will you!
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:5, Funny)
This is truly the year of the Android tablet.
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:5, Funny)
Both casual observation and hard data disagree with your assertion.
Samsung makes lots of phones (I have not read that they make double the number of Apple, but I have read recently that they surpassed them. It's hard to imagine that they doubled Apple's production numbers the same quarter they surpassed them), but they make a lot of *different* phones.
All of the Android manufacturers do. How many Android phones do you think are one step up from a dumb flip phone, but run Android as an OS?
All the major carriers offer these phones.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of the "true" smart phones at the lower end aren't used as smart phones much, either.
Through observation in the wild, I see iPhones everywhere, every day. Android phones? They're there, but they are hardly ubiquitous like the iPhone.
Now the data: Look anywhere that is likely to have a wide representative share of users. Let's take Wikimedia, for instance: the iPhone accounts for 7% of traffic. Android is 4.73% (and tablets are probably included in this number, unlike iOS, which has the iPad segregated).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_chart.png [wikipedia.org]
I think the Android market share is either inflated, or they're counting people who bought an Android phone, have no data plan, have never fired up a browser, never opened the app store, and never did anything but make calls with it.
It counts if all you're interested is how many devices are in the wild, but honestly, what can you do with this statistic that is useful?
If I want to develop and deploy an app, I want to know the actual audience that can potentially be reached by it. I have some visibility of that, but not much. It's further complicated by wide fragmentation on the Android platform.
According to the math they did here, Google is doing about 1 Billion downloads a month. Apple is doing about 1.25 Billion. That's a notable, but not insurmountable gap. But, yeah. Right now Apple is winning by any objective, realistic, meaningful measurement.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/google-play-about-to-pass-15-billion-downloads-pssht-it-did-that-weeks-ago/ [techcrunch.com]
Disclaimer: I don't own any iOS products, and I really want Google to get their act together, because I really dislike the whole walled garden approach Apple and Microsoft are taking.
Android isn't something people *want* now. It's something people settle for because they don't want to pay the Apple premium. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Windows wasn't something people clamored for, either. It was just a standard.
My problem is that I don't want to see a standard that has a walled garden model win.
Re:People want cheaper tablets (Score:2, Funny)
Having said this and in order to retain my inner balance I have to add:
Apple sucks, don't buy their products!
(at least not until they bring back accessible laptop cases!)