Originally Posted by Dai13371:
“Oh I think Apple fear lightning will strike twice. They lost the smartphone lead when Apple owned the smartphone market and they fear they may lose if not all but some of the tablet market, at least enough to put a scratch in their profit margin when the plethora of rival kit becomes far more affordable and the realisation that people are saying "hang on, it seems Apple aren't the only ones producing this sort of kit" becomes more apparent.
I said the Tab 10.1 was ipads greatest rival because it is a tablet which equals if not surpasses Apple's own device. Of course I must be honest here and say this opinion is not at all based upon experience with a Tab 10.1 but with a Tab 7 which I own. I have also used an iPad 2 and I cannot for the life of me work out what the fuss is at all. For me, using the iPad 2 was a very sterile, clinical affair rather like using a Casio calculator.”
Tablet market ≠ smartphone market
Apple never owned the smartphone market, certainly not the way it currently owns the tablet market (i.e.
total and utter domination). It pretty much created the current tablet market, and still sells far far more than everyone else combined, whereas with smartphones it was originally the pesky young upstart, trying to nab share from Nokia and RIM and Sony Ericsson etc.
Still, although Apple doesn't (and never did) totally and utterly dominate the smartphone market like it does the tablet market, and even though Android is the more popular smartphone OS,
Apple is now the "
worldwide number one single manufacturer of smartphones by revenue, profit, and volume, followed by Samsung, then Nokia".
Tablets are different to smartphones.
Most people buy smartphones on a contract, and so get them subsidised. High-end Android phones are cheaper than iPhones, and you may well find you get a better tariff too.
Tablets... although some people get them subsidised on a data contract, the majority buy them outright. So, you don't get the same kind of thing there is with smartphones where people can get an Android phone of equivalent/superior spec. to an iPhone for less money.
With tablets, the
high-end ones all cost the same as the iPad (until they fail to sell very well, and then have their price slashed: See
Moto's
Xoom and RIM's
PlayBook...And then of course there's the HP
TouchPad...).
Apple's
latest quarterly results state that it sold 9.25 million iPads from April to June.
Compare that with...
- 500,000 Playbooks in
RIM's last quarter.
- 440,000 Xooms in
Motorola's last quarter.
It's too soon yet for Tab 10.1 figures, but given that it costs exactly the same as the iPad 2, I would expect it to have similar issues to past competitors (& its own
predecessor). It is a lovely device, but I think that Samsung has priced it too high.
"equals if not surpasses Apple's own device": In what ways? They both have the same CPU, the iPad 2 has a superior GPU, the Tab 10.1 has more RAM, and the iPad 2 has more apps.
[EDIT: I originally also said "the Tab has more built-in options for connectivity" too, as I assumed it had those things that
some people always criticise the iPad for lacking: SD slot, USB, and HDMI... Yet it seems that it doesn't have them, and requires separate adaptors to connect to its proprietary dock interface just like the iPad.]
... And in the tablet market, tech specs are not the be all and end all. Some people will care about which tablet has more RAM, or better graphics, or has an SD slot, or can play Flash... But most don't care. It's all about the apps and the user experience. The iPad
wins on apps, and although the latest Honeycomb on the Tab 10.1 is meant to be much better than the version the Xoom launched with, from what I can gather from reviews and from real user comments, the iPad is still ahead when it comes to the user experience, the usability, etc. People who specifically want an Android tablet, plus people who are the sort of Apple haters DS has a lot of, etc. ...yeah, they'll go for the Tab, or other Android tablet. Pretty much everyone else willing to drop that much money? They go for iPads... 30 million of them.
Given that the iPad is still ahead on apps, plus benefits from the Apple name, the brand, the image (I'd bet that tablet = iPad to most people, plus Apple products are
perceived to be worth more), Apple's competitors need to do more than just bring out endless iPad clones with more RAM, or Flash, or HDMI ports, etc. They need to compete on
price...
I have high hopes for the Amazon tablet bringing some much needed serious competition to the market. Spec-wise it doesn't compare, but if it has the right price-point, and has the whole integrated ecosystem (something only Apple has managed so far), Amazon may be able to carve out a nice chunk of a new "mid-range" market, and attract those who don't want to pay for an iPad (or Tab, or Xoom etc.), but who want more than just some cheapo Archos or Acer etc.