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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."
I know I'm going to sound like a naysayer, so, hey, I may as well nay say.
Google's probably going for a tablet as well, so 2010 will likely be the year of the tablet - in the form of iphones and iclones, with much larger screens, the next must-have at the coffee shops. But it's going to fall flat on its face. It's too close to netbooks, but not as useful as a netbook.
Nay, I say, nay
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
So we're at the first step in the Apple Product Cycle? It's nice to see we're right on track.
As an aside, I think it makes lots of sense for Apple to produce a tablet product, but I can't imagine them actually producing 10,000,000 of these things for launch.
First, it's a ridiculously high number, far exceeding the number of iPhones sold in a year and coming close to the number of all types of iPods combined.
Second, I doubt Apple would ever allow any of their new products to be overproduced. Artificial scarcity only adds to the perceived desirability of Apple products, driving the hype engine even more.
The author of the article has a hard time believing that Apple ordered 10 million tablets this year. While his logic is sound regarding the numbers, the author isn't quoting Apple. The author's source for this rumor is an ex-Google employee. And this employee is not saying Apple "ordered" 10 million only that Apple "plans to produce" 10 million. There's a huge difference between the two. Like any company building a new product, Apple has ordered X amount while letting their suppliers know that they may want up to Y amount. If the product sells well, Apple will increase their order. If it doesn't Apple will not. Also the Y amount may be an unreachable goal. Sometimes when negotiating contracts, some suppliers are not interested unless you are ordering a large amount. Everyone knows that goal isn't likely but it makes everything look good.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I have a modern HP tablet (tx2500 series) that a friend convinced me to buy (got it for a great price). After almost a year of owning it, I still fail to recognize where the tablet functionality is really beneficial. I can type much faster than it can accurately recognize my handwriting, and I haven't found any applications that are truly useful in tablet mode. Sure I have some gimmicky graphics programs that work great and they're fun to show off, but overall it just doesn't do anything special. I think I'd be better off owning both a 15" laptop and a 10" netbook instead of a tablet that's right about in the middle.
As we're seeing with the Kindle, and the iPhone, many people can find uses for additional computers in our lives. I can definitely see a use for a tablet device sitting on my coffee table, waiting to be used by anyone walking in as both a media selector (iTunes to an AirPort Express/Apple TV), or as a general device to answer "Who is in that movie?", "What's on tomorrow", "You're talking BS" questions. I already use my iPhone for that, this would just be a general device, whereas the iPhone is "personal".
Add to that the ability to use it as a general book reader, and you've got a winner.
Tablets aren't laptop replacements, they are secondary displays for the living room, secondary devices that enhance your ability to use the compute power you _already_ have in your house.
Maybe Apple will pull a coup this time around and offer a large tablet interface that's easily dockable.
Maybe making use of something like this patent?
I've thought for a while that it could be pretty neat to have something like an iPhone/PDA with a stripped down portable interface, but when linked to a dock, it becomes a fully capable desktop machine.
Actually, I refuse to believe Jobs is that short-sighted or stupid. That hoopla over web apps was Jobs telling you what you had while he had the team feverishly working on the SDK in the background.
He couldn't say nothing. And he couldn't say it was coming later, because if he did, no one would have touched the iPhone for the first year.
There was more to it than that. I think there was a debate between a native SDK and using a web-based SDK (like what Palm did with WebOS). Apple was clearly working on both tracks, but WebKit was just not ready fast enough. There was evidence of this.
One of the complaints about the web SDK approach was the lack of local storage for offline use. A SQL interface had been proposed for HTML5, but hadn't been implemented by anyone yet. Apple announced the iPhone native SDK on Oct 17. That weekend (on Oct 19th), quietly on the WebKit Blog, HTML5 client-side SQL storage was quietly checked in. Coincidence? No way.
The other thing is for certain, the iPhone native SDK was not ready in time for iPhone 1.0. The jailbreakers had to deal with regular app breakage due to Apple changing APIs. Apple wasn't screwing with the jailbreakers, they were refining the SDK. That is much easier to do if you only have a dozen in-house applications to work on. Once it was declared final for iPhone 2.0, Apple had to support it fully. There have been few changes to the public API since, though there were some for iPhone 3.0.
Oddly enough, I think the people who wish the iPhone to be more open would have been happier if the webSDK approach had won out. It would have made it easy for other companies to support iPhone apps by including a WebKit-based browser.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.