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Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets?
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."
They'll have enough units this time, but what network can handle a jump in traffic?
I really hope it's not AT&Uknowho.
I'm thinking Jobs asked "How much per unit if we're making 10 million of them?" Then after the manufacturer crunches the numbers and comes back with the figures, Jobs will offer to pay that per-unit cost but in increments of 10,000 units.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
And the author knows this how? How do we know it will be a "big iPod", it could be completely different for all we know because nobody has seen it who is allowed to talk about it. Regardless, of what it actually does, the idea that Apple will predict that it will sell 10 million tablets in the first year is hooey. If anything, I would guess they will do the opposite and order too few units in order to increase the demand for the product by creating scarcity. Just ask the Nintendo when the Wii came out or whoever made tickle me elmo how this works...
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Come on now people. This is obviously bogus. Apple would be sitting on 5 million plus (low estimate) tablets when the technology changes in 6-12 months. No way they are ordering 10 million.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
With the strong following that Apple has for its product lines and the underserved tablet market for personal computing i dont see this as unreasonable. provided they got the bugs out before investing in the hardware. a mass order will help Apple secure a better cost and that should bring about a better retail for the consumer.
As someone who has used and supported hundreds of tablets and convertibles, let me assure you the "tablet market" is right where it should be. Tablets require the user to give up a large amount of functionality in the form of a physical keyboard and mouse, and the return for this is minimal and extremely niche. While I do not doubt that Apple could do well selling these on brand alone, tablets are simply not a practical replacement for the standard notebook or desktop.
iSlates aren't meant to compete with netbooks, they are meant to compete with eBook readers (while in addition offering all the functionality of an iPhone or iTouch). Think color eBook reader/video viewer along with a google maps implementation and accelerometers so you can play games just by tilting it, and you see it has gaming functionality that netbooks don't and large screen capability that smartphones don't. (Much as I love my Android phone, it is harder than heck to read things on.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
In answer to you naysayers, I have only this to say:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
As someone who has used and supported hundreds of tablets and convertibles...tablets are simply not a practical replacement for the standard notebook or desktop.
Good thing they won't be building a 'tablet or convertible' then, and won't be trying to shoe-horn a desktop OS into a tablet form factor like other tablets mentioned here which run Windows. Those are attempts at replacing the laptop, which I doubt we'll get from Apple. But this isn't about revolutionary hardware (which we will not see), or devices which run Windows (which are frankly irrelevant). The Kindle is probably a more apt comparison, though it's also very different, or the as yet unreleased MS Courier concept.
What this sort of bullet point comparison to currently shipping products completely ignores is that if the software is sufficiently well thought out, the device transcends its list of features. I imagine the hardware will be as simple as possible, ARM based slate format with a touchscreen, long battery life, and perhaps one button to turn it on. But the hardware doesn't really matter; it's not going to be the first, or the fastest, or the smallest, or the lightest, or the biggest, tablet, though I'm sure Jobs will come up with some superlatives to try and sell it.
The magic sauce that Apple can provide here is in the software; the integration with a massive store selling every kind of media you can imagine, straight to the device, the integration with your desktop computer and phone, calendar and address book, the integration with your existing media library in iTunes, an existing catalogue of apps and games, and finally the pleasure of interacting with a UI which has actually been designed from the ground up for a touch screen interface, instead of grudgingly adapted for it. Good design matters, as Apple products demonstrate. All that stuff is available in pieces from other people, but it's quite hard to put together in a nice package.
The iPhone OS is actually pretty revolutionary as operating systems go - it removes a lot of chrome we've become used to over the years - menus, window widgets, overlapping windows (save alerts), and replaces it with something simpler, and I expect the next evolution of it will take things a little further along this path.
However the greatest potential this device has to shake things up is not in the hardware or software, but in promoting the transition from paper to pixels which began with the www and has been accelerating ever since. If they provide the tools to package and sell snippets of html based content in the style of iTunes LP packages, they could provide the micro-purchase web that content producers have been waiting for, and many consumers who prefer their content not to be infested with ads are willing to pay for. I hope it supports epub, pdf, plain html and other common formats too, just as the iPod supported MP3, and if iPhone software is ported, it will.
At some point they'll just end up picking off their own product sales and they will become their own worst enemy,
I think that's Apple's old way of thinking. The new Apple realizes that to move forward, it needs to compete with its own products, rather than fearing cannibalism. If the possibility for something better exists, and you don't make it for fear of competing with your own products, then somebody else will, and take that business away from you.
This attitude is clear with iPods, where Apple produced new models at a rapid pace, including variations such as the mini and nano which competed with the more expensive full-size iPod. And finally, it happened with the iPhone, which in many ways makes the iPod obsolete. Apple realized it couldn't rely on the iPod being relevant forever, so came up with the next big thing, and finding extra revenue streams such as the App Store.
We also see it to a lesser degree with the Macs. In earlier times, Apple would deliberately cripple its low-end computers so as not to compete with the more expensive models. However, recently, we've seen Macbooks that are nearly as good as the more expensive Macbook Pros, just without the fancy aluminum case. Sure, there are some spec differences, but it's not like the Macbooks are being hobbled out of fear of cannibalism like they were in the past.
... and then they built the supercollider.
This is barely even marginally coherent, let alone insightful. "the iphone dev team will be"... what?
a "computer" where you can run only applications personally approved by Him.
That's an interesting theory, but it runs a bit counter to the fact that every computer he's ever been part of the design/production of has had third party applications he didn't approve.
if you jailbreak this baby then he sends the Apple stormtroopers to shoot you.
Dovetails right in with the latest Apple rumor I heard -- they've contracted with a Chinese company to provide 100,000 private troops. Some sources say they're amassing near Macau now.
only reason people paid for physical news media is that it was cheap.
Um, no. People paid for physical news media because it had value to them and it was pretty much the only large-scale way of distributing information until about 20 years ago.
the kindle is a success because i can read the news for free online, not books.
The Kindle may be useful to you for that reason. That's fine, but if there's a most-frequently-made mistake commentators here on Slashdot tend to make when evaluating products, it's evaluating them by personal priorities alone (and, for bonus points, assuming any other priority set is irrational: no wireless, less space than a nomad == lame, right?). Remember, there's a whole world of other people out there. Some of whom care more about the convenience the Kindle offers than concerns about DRM. The Kindle's a success because some people like it for any number of reasons.
And because it enables one of the world's largest retailers/distributors to move to a model that favors their profitability.
Tweet, tweet.
Why is Windows poorly designed for a tablet? Vista and 7 have excellent support for my Fujitsu Siemens ST5031D.
As always, Apple will change the game for the hip crowd and show them the light.
I just want to point out before Steve invents it that some of us already have decent slates.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Firstly, I'm surprised that such a logical fallacy gets modded up, but then this is an Apple story ("X prediction was wrong in the past, therefore Y prediction must be wrong too"?!) But what's wrong with that often-quoted statement? He doesn't say the Ipod will fail, he says it's lame. Since when does being popular mean it can't be lame? Oh okay - it's now fair game to ridicule every Apple fan who criticises Windows and Internet Explorer. Given how popular they are, they obviously can't be lame, right?
You have a remarkable talent for arguing with yourself. The arguments you attack are absurd, of course, but only because you're misinterpreting the intent of the original statement. The original comment on Slashdot is infamous because it illustrates how out of touch with mainstream thinking geeks can be. I'm sure your Sansa is fine, but the original iPod (not the shuffle) was a game-changing device, not because of its technical prowess (it was indeed 'lame' in technical terms), but because it integrated beautifully with a desktop, had a nice simpler interface, and fitted just enough music in a pocket sized package to be revolutionary and acceptable as a mainstream replacement for something like a walkman.
I think that statement a salutary reminder of how out of touch geeks can become, particularly in an echo-chamber like Slashdot.
I expect this tablet will be similar re the many competing tablets/ereaders/etc. out there at present. It wouldn't take much to completely change this area of computing, given the limited utility of something like a Kindle and the clunkyness of the current crop of Windows tablets (not the unreleased MS Courier, which looks good, but is sadly still a prototype). We'll have to wait and see what Apple comes up with before knowing if its an expensive flop or another revolutionary device though - the gap between the two can be very narrow.