Yup. We also have to remember that the things that some techies go "wow" over, dont really impress the avg. consumer (marketing of said wow-things may create a "wow" though, but thats different all together).
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Apple Projected to Lead Tablet Market Through 2013 as Rivals Stumble
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Yup. We also have to remember that the things that some techies go "wow" over, dont really impress the avg. consumer (marketing of said wow-things may create a "wow" though, but thats different all together).
Totally agree, I can't see anything right now (doesn't mean that there isn't anything) that Apple can add to the iPad 3 that would make the average customer want to buy the next one. You can browse, read books, use apps with the iPad. And I seriously doubt that Apple would start to fragment apps.
Sorry, but HP selling off their tablets is a drop in the sea. It will not by any mean skew the charts.
$829 is for the top of the line model. The starting price for iPad's is $500.
As for things that you can do on an iPad vs. a laptop.
Try sitting on the throne while posting on Facebook with a laptop. Try surfing for hours without having to remember to plug in your laptop. Try reading a novel in bed with a laptop. Try watching a Netflix movie in bed with a laptop.
All of those things are dones millions of times by millions of people. No one is saying that a laptop can't do anything an iPad can. The point is whether you really want to do those things on a laptop. It's all about the size and form factor.
HP's exit casts doubt on others viability
This chart must have been done before HP decided to kill off it's tablet and exit the PC business. As a large, successful, technologically superior company, if HP can't be competitive in the tablet market, it casts doubt on every other major player except Apple. This concern may have limited impact on individual buyers but will have a major effect on corporate sales. As an example, earlier this week United Airlines announced that it is buying 11,000 iPads for its pilots. Other airlines are following suit. Similar purchases are happening in health care and other industries. Once this avalanche starts, Apple's competitors will have an even more difficult time in keeping up. Given that iOS and Android are very different operating systems, no large company is going to by thousands of iPads and then buy additional units that are any but iPads.
My take is that right now the chances between iPad 90% dominance and the iPad merely being the big dog among a bunch of fairly equivalent products is a coin toss ... but as early as the end of this year could certainly firm up projections. If I was forced to place a bet, I would bet on the 90% dominance scenario.
As to the smartphone market, I'll hold off my predictions until 6 months after the October introduction of the iPhone 5 and less expensive new iPhone 4 become available on all of the U.S. networks. At that point, I suspect that the only thing that will hold iPhone sales and market share back will be Apple's manufacturing capabilities, not the presence of Android phones.
This chart must have been done before HP decided to kill off it's tablet and exit the PC business. As a large, successful, technologically superior company, if HP can't be competitive in the tablet market, it casts doubt on every other major player except Apple. This concern may have limited impact on individual buyers but will have a major effect on corporate sales. As an example, earlier this week United Airlines announced that it is buying 11,000 iPads for its pilots. Other airlines are following suit. Similar purchases are happening in health care and other industries. Once this avalanche starts, Apple's competitors will have an even more difficult time in keeping up. Given that iOS and Android are very different operating systems, no large company is going to by thousands of iPads and then buy additional units that are any but iPads.
My take is that right now the chances between iPad 90% dominance and the iPad merely being the big dog among a bunch of fairly equivalent products is a coin toss ... but as early as the end of this year could certainly firm up projections. If I was forced to place a bet, I would bet on the 90% dominance scenario.
As to the smartphone market, I'll hold off my predictions until 6 months after the October introduction of the iPhone 5 and less expensive new iPhone 4 become available on all of the U.S. networks. At that point, I suspect that the only thing that will hold iPhone sales and market share back will be Apple's manufacturing capabilities, not the presence of Android phones.
Amazon will be #2, far behind iPad.
The wannabes will continue to fall all over themselves trying to clone iPad. There's simply too much money to be made. Or so they think.
If and when Amazon releases their own iPad clone, it will crush all other iPad clones. Amazon has hundreds of millions of accounts, plenty of hardware design and manufacturing experience with Kindle, deep experience with enterprise software infrastructure development, vast customer-facing retail experience, and plenty of digital content to sell. Few if any of Apple's current and future rivals have more than one or two of those assets. Amazon has it all.
Amazon currently has their own Kindle Store, which could evolve the way the iTunes Music Store evolved into today's iTunes Store and App Stores. And Amazon has that critical intangible: mindshare. They're a go-to online resource for hundreds of millions of consumers, just like Apple is.
What Amazon lacks is an internal OS and apps group. And if Amazon goes with Android for their iPad clone, they will forever lack those assets. Their iPad clone won't be a "platform," in the sense of a "mobile computing device." It will simply be a sales tool plus a few connected apps (maybe email, browser, twitter client.) And therefore it should be free. That will certainly help to kill off the rest of the iPad clones.
The wannabes will continue to fall all over themselves trying to clone iPad. There's simply too much money to be made. Or so they think.
If and when Amazon releases their own iPad clone, it will crush all other iPad clones. Amazon has hundreds of millions of accounts, plenty of hardware design and manufacturing experience with Kindle, deep experience with enterprise software infrastructure development, vast customer-facing retail experience, and plenty of digital content to sell. Few if any of Apple's current and future rivals have more than one or two of those assets. Amazon has it all.
Amazon currently has their own Kindle Store, which could evolve the way the iTunes Music Store evolved into today's iTunes Store and App Stores. And Amazon has that critical intangible: mindshare. They're a go-to online resource for hundreds of millions of consumers, just like Apple is.
What Amazon lacks is an internal OS and apps group. And if Amazon goes with Android for their iPad clone, they will forever lack those assets. Their iPad clone won't be a "platform," in the sense of a "mobile computing device." It will simply be a sales tool plus a few connected apps (maybe email, browser, twitter client.) And therefore it should be free. That will certainly help to kill off the rest of the iPad clones.
Amazon can use a forked version of Android for their tablet and build in a comprehensive Amazon experience. They don't have to utilize Google services.
The cool thing is that they can make their tablet compatible with Android apps, but keep Google out of their hair.
Maybe someone should scour Amazon's job listings for the past 6 months to see if they're hiring OS programmers and Java experts and such.
Because we all know how long the Zune lasted as a brand.
And how's that 'Plays For Sure' music working out for you?
Microsoft will almost certainly still be around a good while into the future, but their attempts at long-term (non-peripheral) hardware brands haven't exactly had an untarnished record outside the XBox/360. (And even that branch has only recently broken even for them.)
I for one never said tablets have no place nor offer unique benefits to users, my argument is that whatever those things are, it's not much.
If someone felt spending at least $500 on a gadget just so they can sit on the toilet to post on FB, I could technically do the same with a smartphone... but I get your argument about the size advantage of a tab over a phone. However I read somewhere that 1 in 3 tablet owners do spend time on the toilet using them, which disgusts me.
Using a tab would be easier in bed than a laptop but I think we're nit picking a tad on that topic. It would be like someone trying to argue how 1 brand of laptop is better than another simply because the onboard NIC of the 1st machine supports packet injection whereas the other does not. Not everyone will stand to benefit from having that sort of feature and those that do will be a very small minority.
The overwhelming aspect of a tablet is that it's easier to carry around and people like the instant on and off nature of using them.
Zune isnt Windows, is it? Second, brand-wise Zune is still there apparently. As a european i wouldnt know, as MSFT hasnt really cared much bout our market. Nor has Apple or Google though, to be fair. Odd, seeing how its probably one of the best markets to try things out on, due to us swedes being kickass - but thats a different story.
Again: MSFT has W8 around the corner. With W8 we will experience the first step of form-factor convergence, and i can promise you that itll be supported through out this decade at the very least. Ergo: Microsoft isnt going anywhere.
(Btw, i never said anything about MS-owned HW-brands, did i? If thats how you read my post, my pad... oh bad*)
* that pun was completely unintended; i dedicate it to freud!
p.s.
sure, microsoft has failed now and again, then again so has apple. You dont see many Pippins, TAMs or Newtons out there - do you? :- )
I wasn't responding to you. I was responding to iEvolution's post. But since you share the same position ...
Of course a laptop can do everything a tablet can ... it's more flexible because it has to be. The point is that a tablet can do some things more easily than a laptop. Apparently there's enough of a market that these tablets are supplanting the 2nd and 3rd computers in a household.
I wasn't responding or talking about smartphones. There's a lot of overlap between a tablet and smartphones. If I had a smartphone, there'd be less of a reason for me to have an iPad.
I wouldn't say that using a tablet in bed vs. a laptop is picking nits. It's much more enjoyable to use a tablet in bed than trying to use a laptop. So much so that we don't bring the MB into bed to watch recorded shows anymore ... note - we don't have a TV in the bedroom.
Yup, the two tiered approach is serving them well and if they arrive on Sprint and T-Mobile, their US marketshare should be in good shape versus Android.
I think if Apple had it to do over again, they might have taken a different entry approach into the smartphone market and created a lower tier product from the get go.
Some people do not understand that the small access window available for the iPhone is the main reason why Android was able to gain such a strong foothold in the new smartphone market Apple created.
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Undoubtedly most people/households will end up having a tablet for their primary computing device rather than a laptop. It is just a matter of time. I think a lot of people here are too technically orientated and really do not appreciate what normal people use their computers for... They do not need laptops or desktops. They can do everything they want on a tablet.
The tablet space is going to be a massive chunk of the entire consumer computer market in the next 10 years.
Considering Apple's absurd patent claims, it's amazing anyone had the guts to bother building a different tablet at all. Since, according to Apple's murder of patent crows, it is an infringement on the holy iPad if you make a device that is rectangular and has a screen.
What you mention is the copyright/tradedress claim which is not a patent. Obviously you have no idea what you are talking about. The separate patent claims are about how the software works.
The copyright/tradedress claim is more about the green phone icon in the bottom left hand corner of Samsung android phones than the shape. The two together reinforce Apple's claims of copying.
I wish there were less idiots espousing their opinions rather than facts on the Internet
The question is .... How many of the $99 touchpad buyers were potential android buyers? Will their purchases take away from future android purchases? Were they people on the fence about tablets? Will they buy a better android tablet or will they decide that tablets aren't useful to their lifestyle?
In my brief look, most of the HP Touchpad buyers were techies that weren't going to buy an iPad but would potentially buy an android device.
What are they thinking now?
And HP lost so much money doing this that Apple's share of the total profits might be bigger than 100%
(That would be the case if HP's loss is more than everyone else's profit except Apple taken together). There's the question how many people who bought an HP tablet for $99 will therefore not buy an iPad, or not buy some other tablet.
It is unfortunate that US law uses the same word (patent) for two completely different things; for protecting inventions and for protecting designs.
Interesting tablet news:
(windows slate as in running Windows 8, to avoid confusion here).
You do know that pretty much every phone in the history of time that ever used an icon, and added color to it, made it into a phone icon and used the color of green? (red for hanging up). This applies not only to cellular phones, but basically to all types of phones. In fact, i'd be amazed if you found a phone that used a different color than green (and a different icon than a handset). Were talking about thousands of prior examples here, if not more.
Second, the EU design registration was the major part of the latest cases (Dutch & German ones), in fact i doubt they mentioned the green icon even once. One judge threw Apples case out (pretty much) all together (the way the gallery app worked was too similar, but they are allowed to use swipe (this was patent-based, not design-based)), the other have yet to rule but upheld the injunction and will give its ruling on the 9th (however, im not sure if this ruling includes both considerations of validity and infringement, or only the latter).
Give it a rest....
The software giant demonstrated an unknown quad-core Windows slate on Thursday at its Tech-Ed New Zealand conference. Microsoft employees Jeff Johnson and Patrick Hevesi showed off some new Windows powered slate devices during the Come and see the latest and greatest in Windows Devices presentation at Tech-Ed New Zealand earlier today. Alan Burchill, a Microsoft MVP, posted details of the session on Thursday revealing that Microsoft promised to give the device out at an upcoming Microsoft event. Burchill has since removed his comments but ZDNets Mary Jo Foley managed to note that Burchill said: What is very interesting is that device was a Quad Core Windows Slate that will be give(n) out at an upcoming Microsoft Event.
(windows slate as in running Windows 8, to avoid confusion here).
What you mention is the copyright/tradedress claim which is not a patent. Obviously you have no idea what you are talking about. The separate patent claims are about how the software works.
The copyright/tradedress claim is more about the green phone icon in the bottom left hand corner of Samsung android phones than the shape. The two together reinforce Apple's claims of copying.
I wish there were less idiots espousing their opinions rather than facts on the Internet
You do know that pretty much every phone in the history of time that ever used an icon, and added color to it, made it into a phone icon and used the color of green? (red for hanging up). This applies not only to cellular phones, but basically to all types of phones. In fact, i'd be amazed if you found a phone that used a different color than green (and a different icon than a handset). Were talking about thousands of prior examples here, if not more.
Second, the EU design registration was the major part of the latest cases (Dutch & German ones), in fact i doubt they mentioned the green icon even once. One judge threw Apples case out (pretty much) all together (the way the gallery app worked was too similar, but they are allowed to use swipe (this was patent-based, not design-based)), the other have yet to rule but upheld the injunction and will give its ruling on the 9th (however, im not sure if this ruling includes both considerations of validity and infringement, or only the latter).
Give it a rest....
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Didn't say that you were responding to me, rather I was simply stating my solo position on that issue.
Again never said you did, however the point is still valid in such that tablets offer limited real use and it appears that the majority of computer users are those who only need something for limited real use which supports your comment regarding product overlap. You mentioned using the tablet while pooping, I merely drove the point on how a tablet's unnecessary since smartphones are more commonplace and anyone can post FB while cr*pping on the seat.
The point being made was your example of using a tablet in bed isn't the driving reason behind why the majority of people buy tablets in the first place, it's just one of your own personal reasons for buying one and it's a benefit to you in that way.
The majority of other people didn't go to a store to buy a tablet because they need something to use while in bed... which is similar to computer users who claim to be power-users. Power users make up a very small minority out of the whole of all computer users. Sure it's nice to have a powerful laptop with lots of CPU power, RAM and SSD, but it appears that the mass majority has no real need for any of that since a tablet appears to fulfill most of their computing needs.
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Tablet manufacturers will be able to catch up if they start using decent hardware. But that's the whole point. Apple's supply chain management tactics ensure that other manufacturers will have to either pay through their nose to get decent hardware or settle for second-rate hardware. Apple has utilized the concept of economies of scale to great effect.
Also, let me give you a little tidbit about laptop makers being able to catch on with ultra-thin laptops. They're having a lot of trouble matching Apple on price. The reason-economies of scale. This is why I laugh whenever people say that Apple is hoarding too much cash and not doing anything with it. How wrong they all are. Apple is using their cash hoard in unconventional ways.
An article came out a few months ago describing how Apple uses their cash hoard. According to the article, Apple needs specialized manufacturing equipment for their products, but the upfront investment is prohibitive for Apple's manufacturing partners. Therefore, Apple foots the bill for that equipment in exchange for exclusive service from the manufacturer for a period of time. The manufacturer has to use that machine to manufacture Apple products only. After the exclusivity period is up, the manufacturer can serve other customers too. However, by the time this happens, Apple will have moved on to something else so the loss of exclusivity is not damaging. According to that article, the aluminum unibody construction method remains a trade secret. Other manufacturers have yet to figure out how Apple does it.
Let me mention one more thing. The iPad doesn't do Flash, but other tablets do. As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on Flash. But the mistake that competitors have made is to spend the past year-and-a-half dancing with Adobe. While a lot of people care about Flash, it's not going to be that "killer feature." Consumers want the whole package, and evidently, Flash alone cannot tip the scales.
Things will get more competitive, but one should think twice before betting against Apple in tablets.
My guess right now is that Google will start to catch up in the tablet computer space when Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") ships around November 2011. It's possible that Andy Hertzfeld--who designed much of the interface of the original Macintosh GUI--may be involved in developing the revamped interface for Android 4.0.
Agreed on size and form factor being a factor in what is convenient to use for a certain application.
Using that same line of reasoning, I find a 7" tablet to be nicer for reading in bed. It's more of a book size. It's also easier to carry around without everyone knowing.
This assumes that Apple is "sitting on their hands" when it comes to developing iOS, iPad hardware, and the iPad ecosystem. They aren't.
The fact of the matter is, Google will be very lucky if they are able to hold on to the roughly 50% smartphone marketshare they have right now. And they'll be doing everything they can to fight that battle (where at least the road to profitability is feasible) - rather than throwing hundreds of millions into Tablet operating system development, where the profits are going to be a lot harder to come by.
How so? Most consumers have shown a preference for Wi-Fi only, or at least limited 3G and 4G access on their tablet purchases. This makes some sense - relatively few people want another monthly data expense. The Tablet market has also shown the importance of Apps. Relatively few apps = not much interest among the wider consumer market. But an App-based environment means even less opportunity for Google to make money. If the only way you plan on making money is by selling display ads - Tablets are a very bad way to go.
Google might hope to somehow leverage its purchase of Motorola Mobility in such a way as to create some form of vertical integration in the Tablet market. But actual physical products of that integration are probably at least 9 months away from store shelves. And they've also got to worry about keeping Google's other Android-Tablet partners happy in the meantime, or risk alienating them by showing preference to Motorola.
Its a very complicated game going on right now. Its not - in any way - a two-party "game of chess", with Apple and Google taking turns trying to outflank each other. Its more like a weird form of poker: Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, HTC, and RIM are all playing Texas Hold 'em. Apple is playing 7-card draw, holding a couple of Aces and two wild cards. HP just folded. Google just went All-In by buying MMI. Oracle and Microsoft just caught a few players cheating, and are holding out for a share of their winnings. Apple has accused some players of cheating - and hope to get them thrown out of the casino (if not actually hanged from the nearest tree.)
The graphic Performance, which by your own assessment sets Apple's iOS apart from the rest, is better due to better software. The hardware is already similar enough to know Apple's software is more efficient. At least for the general OS interface elements and responsiveness (Games which do more direct OpenGL with the hardware don't show the same advantage).
So same or even hardware won't erase Apple's advantage. The other guys need to really improve their software or they need vastly better hardware to match Apples feeling of smoothness. Still Apple is a suppliers dream at the moment so if anyone has a way to leapfrog current performance then they'll be knocking on Apples door or keeping it to themselves. So really only a couple of the Android produces have that ability.
Plus I don't thing the additional "features" offered are really resonating with the market as being bonuses or the market place would already look different. Maybe in the future they might but at the moment not.