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Are Tablets Just Too Expensive?
An anonymous reader writes "Over at PCWorld they're asking a simple but valid question: Are tablets just too expensive? They point out that, weight-for-weight, pure silver is cheaper than most tablets, and that, like jewelery, tablets are highly thievable. The worst thing might be that the nascent tablet platform gets written-off as a high-priced niche for people with more money than sense."
They point out that, weight-for-weight, pure silver is cheaper than most tablets,
I've also noticed that compared to a microwave oven, tablets are mediocre at thawing frozen dinners.
I work with baseball players and it's extremely helpful to be able to put some clips and pictures on a tablet and take that out to the field to show them what I want to do. I used to do that with my iTouch, but an iPad is better because of the bigger screen. An iPad is also lighter and cheaper than a laptop.
Maybe a tablet is overkill for some applications, but it's not for the ones I use it.
This is the general problem with cost-based thinking rather than value-based thinking.
I'm not sure what the motivation to ask the question "are they too expensive" comes from, when tablets (in generalities) are one of the hottest selling segments of the computing market right now. Can you imagine how long a marketing guy at Apple would have a job if he stood up in a board meeting and suggested that the iPad was too expensive...all while they're selling them by the millions.
Now if the question were different, like "is tablet 'x' too expensive", then it might be an interesting conversation. I've seen several new tablets poised for sale at costs HIGHER than the ipad...which seems like a ridiculously short sighted move. You don't enter a market with a "me too" product priced higher than the established leader (unless you're Apple), unless you have something markedly better to offer. And frankly, "it's android" doesn't rise to that level.
I think another element is that tablets are primarily oriented at content consumption, which places them into the same category as standalone DVD players, MP3 players, handheld game consoles, etc. And within those categories, yes, a tablet is at least double the cost of other devices. At least with a notebook the possibility of productivity exists, whether or not it is always utilized in that manner.
As a comparison, you can purchase a rather nice and large LCD television with built-in internet connectivity such as Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, etc for the same price as a premium tablet. It would certainly seem that tablets should be in the realm of netbook pricing giving computing power, storage, display size, etc (especially when considering how much less mass and mechanical parts are involved with a tablet compared to a netbook).
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I agree. I was beginning to doubt that until a particular friend of mine went out and bought one. When it first came out he was excited by it, but he said that he was going to wait for the "killer ap" to come out for it. Six months later he went out and bought one. I asked him what the "killer ap" was and he said, "Well, it does this and it does that." All things that fell into one of three classes. Either his laptop or his Iphone already did them in ways that totally suited his needs or it was a functionality that was purely for play. He bought one because his sense of "cool" could not stand being without one any longer.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
My iPad never leaves my coffee table. I've seen people using them at work, but honestly unless you're planning on doing stuff while walking around, a laptop/netbook will serve better.
That being said though, the tablet format is the ideal couch computing device. Sure, I could use my EVO, and frequently do while my girlfriend has the ipad, but screen real estate really does have value. Hell, try to use an RDP client on the EVO, it's an exercise in masochism, while on the ipad it works great.
Great call, the things are selling like hotcakes. Gartner says sales will quadruple in 2011.
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I say yes but the market may say otherwise.
It may be that many people have uses for computing devices that don't fit into the desktop or laptop or smartphone models. For example, the iPad can be used to review pictures taken on a digital camera, without the need for a heavy laptop. I've seen them used for task training in industrial plants, and as a handy portable process monitor in a similar plant. Something the size and weight of a clipboard is a lot easier to deal with than a laptop. A thin tablet is easy to handle - particularly if you're not sitting at a desk while you're working.
I don't like how some (iPads) are offered as Wifi only or for 100 more you get 3G. I was under the impression you need to sign up for a plan.
I want both WiFi and cell data for later short-term use like a vacation. Price the one model in the middle of the two and be done with it.
I'm not sure what you don't like about giving the customer the choice of not paying for a 3G radio if they don't want one. For example, a company can save a fair amount of money if they buy the Wifi-only model for use in an industrial plant.
The Wifi-only models don't have a 3G radio in them. The 3G radio costs something. Most likely not $100, but certainly not $0. At some point, there has to be a price difference.
The 3G model can be used without 3G service. You don't have to sign up for anything if you want to use a 3G iPad only over wifi.
It sounds like you're not the target market for this type of product, or you simply don't know much about them.
Putting moderation advice in your
I don't understand gold either.
There are many reasons for it. NPR's "Planet Money" did a podcast asking the question "Why Gold?", and came to the conclusion that even if they had it to do all over again, gold is pretty much the best metal for using as a currency. It is rare, but not too rare, it is very inert, and it is easy to identify.
Podcast: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/131363098/the-tuesday-podcast-why-gold
I didn't get it before until I listened to that.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
The iPad has been worth every penny so far. $50 a month (500+tax)/12 is less than my smartphone bill, and it's well worth not having to lug around the laptop most of the time. I've saved a ton of money on magazines and books which are now always available in one 'book'. And it's a great little gaming device so I've saved a lot of money I would have spent on much more expensive DS games instead.
Now I'd like to escape the Apple ecosystem, so a ~$500-600 10 inch tablet with Honeycomb would be extremely attractive. And certainly justifiable, especially with the sale of the iPad which is still worth quite a bit used.
The ones without any sense here are the people who can't even imagine the huge number of ways you can use a tablet to improve your life. Unless you're one of the people who really needs a full laptop with you constantly - then it's arguably too much for too little gain.
A year before the iPad came out, a friend of mine spent well over $2,500 on a MacBook. She saved money from her $10/hr job to buy it. A year later, asked for help writing a resume to try to find a better job -- and it turns out that she didn't even know if she had a word processor installed on it. Literally all she had ever done with it was use iTunes to play music and use Safari to check her mail, look at web pages, and watch music videos.
My friend really wanted an Apple product. She lives in Brooklyn, and she sees all of the other people her age covet those Apple products, and she wanted the status of being able to take out an Apple product in a coffee shop. If the iPad had been around at the time, she would have been able to save almost two thousand dollars, and she'd still end up with a device that serves exactly the same purpose: basic web browsing and video playing, with a big Apple logo that other hip Brooklyn people will use to recognize that she fits in.
I'm not sure if this can be generalized to all tablets in general, but I think it speaks to exactly the right price point for the iPad. It was a brilliant move for Apple to introduce the iPad at a time when people were starting to have less money to spend on computers. People who hesitated about buying, say, a MacBook Air could still buy the cachet of having the latest Apple product. And it hasn't seemed to cannibalize Apple sales at all.
(Disclaimer: I've used a MacBook Pro as my main computer for years, and I really like it. That may or may not have colored my opinion.)
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Right, like the iPhone and iPod. As a shareholder, I can live with these 10-year "fads."
I'm sure you are putting your money where your mouth is and shorting Apple r buying puts, right Nostradamus?
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IMHO the best is the tablet with the physical keyboard. i.e. those nascent laptops where the lid (screen) can swivel 360 and fold back down so it looks like a thick tablet. That way you have a tablet when u want one, and a Real keyboard when u want to enter lots of text. Pat
Tablets are currently closed systems for the most part.
Give me an open system and we'll talk.
What is there to to talk about? You don't seem to be the target demographic of tablets. "Open" brings nothing to the table for an end "user". Absolutely nothing. It also is no substitute for a rich and powerful API with deep access to OS functionality.
Speaking as a developer of enterprise systems, I would always prefer access to a complete API that allows me to do what I need to get done rather than having to rely partially on API calls and partially on direct calls to the internal database/private APIs. The main reason why you want to stick to a public API is that have a much higher chance having your code break when a update or new version comes a long when you access unexposed internals than sticking with the public API.
Open systems tend to encourage programmer laziness on the part of both the third party developers and developers of the platform and end users end up suffering because of it with bugs and incompatibilities when a new update is released.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It is rare, but not too rare, it is very inert, and it is easy to identify.
That's why fiat currency is so great. It's exactly as rare as we decide it should be. It can be made easy to identify and hard to forge. It's not exactly inert, but in a paper currency, that's a benefit, as the supply can be reduced through attrition. To link a paper currency to gold just removes our ability to adjust its rarity. Gold is great in a collapsed society that can't rely on a central authority to limit the money supply, but in a civilized country, it's just too limited.
The only problem comes in when people can't agree how rare the currency should be. Some people think we have too much, some think there's too little, others think there should be no choice in the matter and it should be set based on a pile of gold bars stashed away being unhelpful to anyone.
Laptops are now the middle-ground, and less needed all the time.
Um no. Laptops are still good for what they've always been good at. portable computing. doing real work when you aren't at your desk.
Tablets are just filling the couch niche that laptops were used for but never were very good at.
Between a laptop and a tablet I need a laptop. Once I already have a laptop, then sure a tablet would be useful but not necessary.
I can't wait for the day I can finally stop carrying my "work computer" back and forth every day.
If your work computer (laptop) can really be replaced by a tablet, then you don't do much real work with it.
So, do you understand Fiat Currency any better? Why Fiat Currency?
The problem with Fiat Currency is that it has no basis in value, except the faith of people in it. You think that is any better way of valuing something?
It's the same way of valuing something. Gold only works because we agree on it, just like any other kind of fiat currency. Gold is a bit more primitive and reliable, but otherwise it's the same. If people stop accepting gold, it loses its value. It has no inherent value. Unlike a functional device. Or food.
wrong disaster, you need the werewolf apocalypse to have any use for your brick of solid silver
People, what a bunch of bastards
Gold is of little practical use. If people didn't use it for jewelry it would have no attractiveness at all. It is hardly ever used in dentistry any more. Only very small amounts are used in electronics, and only for it's conductivity and anti-oxidation attributes. And as an actual currency (as in coins) people used to file small amounts of gold off large numbers gold coins, effectively stealing money from the money itself!
The only reason gold is valuable is because there are enough people out there that have been convinced that it is valuable. The expense of extracting it from the earth doesn't mean it has any value. Fossilized dinosaur shit is rare, very inert, and easy to identify, but you don't see people using it for money. Maybe if Steve Jobs hyped it as the new currency for Mac users it might gain some traction....
Not to mention that, like diamonds, slave labor is used to extract most gold and the market is controlled by cartels with ties to all sorts of human rights abuses all over the world.
My AAPL stock is up like 40 fold in the last 20 years. So yeah, I'll go with Steve Jobs' vision instead of yours, if it's all the same to you, Nostradamus.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Oh my god, a Xeon X5690 weighs only a few grammes and costs $1700, that's 4 or 5 times the price of gold! How dare they make them so expensive!
I am not sure if that is a car analogy or not.
"We" are the people who elect the government who appoints the "asshole" who decides what it should be. I don't have enough data, or training, to be able to decide what the total money supply should be, but it's my job to vote for someone I can trust to look past their ulterior motives and do what makes sense economically. If that means not voting for Liberal or Conservative (I'm Canadian), then so be it. We can protest, but for the most part, we're unqualified to have an opinion on the matter and are just respouting someone else's talking points. If we trust their opinions, then we need to try and convince them to run for office and elect them, so they can have a direct hand in policy. If, on the other hand, we wouldn't trust them in office, then maybe we shouldn't trust them out of office. Anyway, too far off topic. Yeah.... tablets are a waste of money.
By adjusting the fractional reserve requirements for banks in a gold-backed currency, you can increase or reduce the money supply just as easily as with a fiat currency. This is why the goldbugs are such total morons: They imagine that there's some limit on the money supply based on the limit of the gold supply; unless you have a 1:1 correspondence between gold and dollars (an economically crippling thing in itself), there's no effective limit because you can always adjust the ratio--just like with a fiat currency.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Fiats are indeed rare in the US, but not too rare, and easy to identify by their cheap-yet-econmical styling.
We've a few faculty that have purchased iPads. For all of them it is just a toy. They all continue to keep and use their desktop and laptop computers, one of them even has a netbook in addition to his laptop that he still keeps and uses. I've never seen them do any work with them, never even use them for a presentation which seems to be where they'd be most useful. They always travel with their laptops since they need them.
So the tablets are just tech gadgets, just toys. None of them have presented a convincing case as to what they want it for, what they'd use it for.
Nothing wrong with toys, but call it what it is. I've heard lots of hype about how amazingly useful they are in terms of productivity and so on but I've never met anyone who replaced their laptop with one for doing work. In actuality they all just get used for noodling around with, and often set aside.
Our student is the funniest. He's a big time Apple zealot and of course got one as soon as it came out. Talked up a storm about how awesome it was and how it would revolutionize so many things, including gaming because "You can use all 10 fingers!" (apparently I don't on my keyboard according to him). He'd bring it to work all the time and usually use it to do e-mail, it was amusing watching him use the on screen keyboard at about 10-20wpm when he can type 80+ on a real keyboard.
However these days, the iPad is not seen at work. He doesn't bother to bring it in anymore. Apparently as "revolutionary" as it may be, a normal computer is still what is called for here. The reality is, of course, he got it as a toy and it isn't useful to carry it in and now that the shiny new factor has worn off it just sits around his house.
Who's this "we" that you speak of. Fiat currency is as rare as some asshole with ulterior motives decides it should be. I'm not trying to imply that gold is the solution, ...
Having owned a few Fiats, I think a Fiat backed currency is a terrible idea. The damn things just don't last. And convertibility? Hah! It's all one way. You spend currency to buy one, lots more to keep it running, and then you can never get squat for it if you want to sell it. Gold is a much better choice.
:-)
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