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iPad 2 Forces Samsung To Reevaluate Galaxy Tab
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iPad competitors are still spec-obsessed, and Apple's next-gen iPad coupled with the same price point is forcing Samsung to rethink its tablet strategy and pricing methodology altogether. The South Korean Yonhap News Agency relays a quote from Lee Don-joo, executive VP of Samsung's mobile division, about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1 compared to the new iPad. 'We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,' Don-joo said. 'Apple made it very thin.' Features aside, Samsung also finds itself in a bind price-wise. The upcoming Galaxy Tab model, complete with a 10.1-inch screen and Android 3.0, was initially going to be priced higher than the current 7-inch Galaxy Tab. Apple's iPad 2, however, is forcing Samsung to 'think that over.'"
This is awesome news. Competition is good for us!
how is Apple making the iPad so cheap? Nobody tries to go head to head with Apple. It's a waste of time. They're just too hip. So you fight on price or you fight on features. If the other tablet makers are neck & neck with Apple on price there must be a reason....
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Apple didn't really add anything different in the iPad 2 that other competitors didn't already have. However it was thinner and cheaper than the Galaxy Tab. But, I would pay more for more features if the Tab has them.
TekGoblin
It'll be nice to see some better competition. I'm even willing to pay a bit more for a device with a USB host that I can run any software I want on, but there's a limit. I'd actually be really happy with one of the $100 7" Chinese tablets running Android if they had a proper capacitive screen. Hope production costs on them drop soon.
So Apples new iPad 2 with the same size screen is the same price as the old one (with the same size screen) and Samsung's newer model with a much larger screen costs more so Samsung needs to think over pricing? Is their VP drinking the Apple Kool Aid? And seriously, does the skinnierness even matter? Sure, the rounded edge looks a helluva lot better than the old flat edge, but if it was the same thickness would anybody die? That new cover is very way cool though. All the 3rd party accessory guys must be going "thank god it isn't backwards compatible".
is their updates to software and the quality of those updates. As an example, Samsung Epic 4 owners have waited many months for the update to Froyo. Finally, an update was pushed out recently, and promptly withdrawn. A working update is still not shipping.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Wait until after the holidays for a discounted iPad 3
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Apple runs it's own retail chain that is extremely cost effective (I believe they make the most $/square foot of any retailer). So while their competitors sell products wholesale and end up with two layers of markup (one for them and one for the retailer), Apple handles the marketing and retail aspect itself, and that's where they achieve their savings over the competition. Even the article you're responding to is free advertising for Apple, savings in action. So next time you're complaining about the free advertising Apple gets, keep in mind it's part of the reason you can buy an iPad for $500.
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It is amazing how the conversation changes. I remember a year ago, there was a lot of people dumping on the iPad as overpriced, that they could get a more powerful netbook for hundreds less.
Now today, it is all about how is Apple making them so inexpensive.
Strange...
http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110305/samsungs-10-inch-tablet-to-ship-as-announced-despite-apples-ipad-2-announcement/?mod=ATD_rss
“We will continue to make every effort to provide the most powerful, well-designed and productive mobile device to customers,” Executive Vice President Lee Don-Joo is quoted by Yonhap as saying.
A Samsung spokesman told the outlet the release plan for the Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 has not been affected, but declined to say when the device will ship.
Apple's iPad competitors are still spec-obsessed, and Apple's next-gen iPad coupled with the same price point is forcing Samsung to rethink its tablet strategy and pricing methodology altogether.
Seriously. What kind of moron CEO's and board members exist these days? Its obvious that Apple released a killer product and yet these idiots do nothing to try and compete. It was pretty much already known what the iPad 2 would have in it, and yet they did nothing but wait until it was released and NOW they are trying to rethink their strategy? Any two-bit / . moron could do a better job than these idiots and yet they are pulling in hundreds of thousands to millions a year plus bonuses. It just goes to show you that being a CEO or CFO or CIO doesn't mean shit as far as your intelligence goes. It must be social connections that get these assholes into their undeserved positions.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Competitors come out with new products? When did this start happening?!
Oh well, back to the drawing board, Samsung. It should only take a year or two to develop something that you can be assured, will totally crush your all competitors' 2011 products.
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Since this quote came out last week, Samsung woke up and realized that the greatest feature of the iPad2 is hype. Samsung has more recently chosen to return to the original game plan and just come out with the Tab 10 the way they designed it.
Fanbys will be fanboys. A faster, better, cheaper Android tablet will not influence the diehard Apple fans to even hint at looking away from the iPad2. Tech savvy Apple haters will buy a Xoom or a Tab 10. Everyone else will either be influenced by the extremist nuts closest to them, or just wait until tablets are more useful and better priced. Until then, these flame wars are nothing but petty conjecture.
Big players like Samsung must stop playing catch up, now. Stop looking at Apple and monkeying them, that'll get you nowhere. Nobody wants a copycat. Branch out in your own directions or *gasp* outpace Apple. Pour money into research. Raise the quality of your products. Release more timely updates for longer. Yes, it can be risky, but look where that got Apple. They literally created the tablet market.
You can innovate, but not if you're doing your best to be a follower.
Its' too little too late. Don't even try to compete on specs, or other bullshit...compete on price and targeted use. Get a $100 capacitive touch screen tablet that is little more than a portable web browser...watch how many you sell. I'll take 3 today. Hell, I'll sell my ipad and buy however many I can with the proceeds.
Shhhhh... keep your "facts" and "reality" to yourself. You are interrupting the 5th consecutive Apple fanboy circlejerk story on slashdot today.
A company denying something doesn't make it not true. Doesn't make it true either.
Why Don-joo stop trying to compete with iPad and do something else.
Yes, it is very easy actually.
1) They have huge quantities of scale. While other manufacturers are making 100's of models, Apple focuses on a few. Easier to get great prices on millions of the same part, then to get prices on thousands of different parts with retooling in between.
2) That huge cash reserve? They are using it to hedge prices. For example they are pre-purchasing key components so that the manufacturer does not have to add in risk costs for unknown future prices. They are also sharing the cost of new manufacturing facilities as part of a contract to get better prices. Hard to compete when you can't buy components because they have bought up half the supply, leaving everyone else to fight over the other half.
3) The entire company is ran very lean, probably the biggest lean manufacturing company in existence. Since all their effort is very focused, they do not have the overhead that most other companies their size have. Check out their R & D spending versus sales. Incredible.
For those that think they are running razor thin margins to get iPad hardware sales to make it up on the back side, you do not know Apple very well. They make healthy margins on everything they do. They have even hinted that they could drop the prices on iPads if they need to and still make a lot of profit. They are a public company, check it their filings.
I really, really wanted a Windows tablet five years ago, but the prices were way too high. Whatever your feelings about Apple, their ability to crank tablet prices down to a reasonable range has been a big boon for everyone wanting to buy the form factor. They may lead right now, but when suppliers catch up and can get parts to all manufacturers (in a year or two), we'll all be better off that this is no longer considered a luxurious exclusive of the high end like the Windows slates used to be.
But how do they do it? Jobs may be the PR showman, but Tim Cook is the Compaq-alumnus who is the real price magician.
Remember back in 2005 when Apple made a huge exclusive deal for 5 years of Flash RAM with Samsung? That was more than a year before they even introduced the iPhone, but Tim Cook locked up supplier deals people thought were insane at the time. Apple only makes Macs and iPods, what the heck are they going to use all that flash RAM for?
Apple now has a lot of cash on hand to get the best prices and to make exclusive deals like that, which they said they just did for three more critical parts in their last earnings report (and people are speculating over what those three parts are).
But finally, when suppliers aren't able to deliver on time, in quantity, and at a good price, they haven't been shy about pitting suppliers against each other.
Even with the cheapest supplies, might Apple be selling the iPad at a loss? At least for the 1st generation iPad, it's unlikely. Though Apple doesn't break out many numbers they show that iPad revenue over Christmas was almost equal to Mac revenue. Considering the larger sales of the iPad, more sold at a loss would be more loss, and that doesn't seem to have happened with their record profits over Christmas. Second, Phil Schiller last year said after the introduction but before it went on sale that Apple still had some pricing flexibility (meaning they could cut deals with big companies or bring the price down to the public, if no one bought it). Those two things together really suggest that this isn't a loss leader for Apple like the XBox was for Microsoft back in 2005. This may all change with iPad 2, but it doesn't really look like they added any expensive features to the (minor?) upgrade this time around.
With as many of the iPad parts coming from Samsung (including the A4 & A5 system-on-a-chip) you'd expect Samsung would be in the best position to make a real competitor. Apple's price advantage (though painful to competitors, right now) is short term. It's good that the market is getting competitive with low power, touch input, tablet supplies. And it will be even better for users when tablets in 2012 will be significantly better and maybe even cheaper from a variety of sources.
Just be patient, Samsung and the iPad competitors will be back soon with better products.
The only thing I'd worry about changing from the iPad 2 is the screen res. Higher res would make me happy. Other than that, I'd un-bevel the two ends of the tablet (to make it un-iPad-looking) and put all the ports and buttons there and there only-- including a couple host USB. I'd love to be able to run Ubuntu 11.04 and Android in a dual boot configuration with full hardware support for both. The $500 price.. is fine. Just a matter of me saving up. And I will.
What he really said was "We will have to improve the parts that are smooth."
When the iPod came out, we had tons of competitors trying to develop an MP3 player that would match its grace and simplicity. Now, we're looking at the iPad 2 jump on the market, and everyone else is running around trying to build a better tablet that matches it grace and simplicity. We're all talking about price point, but Apple has already shown that price point isn't the real truth here.... it's about getting the user experience for the end user right, and Apple's found one that the also-rans can't quite meet up to. I'm no Apple fanboi, but I've seen this story play out before. Am I wrong?
Why is it so surprising that Apple made it thin? Did he honestly not think they would try to do that? I could have told you at the launch of iPad 1 that the next one would be thinner with better specs.
In the beginning, there was null.
Don't compete on specs -- compete on quality, usability, and features. You can slap all the hardware in the world into a sleek case and if it looks like crap and operates like crap, nobody's going to buy it.
Apple realizes this. Motorola and Samsung do not.
No one who knows anything about electronics manufacturing thinks this. The $499 16GB iPad, by all estimations, costs under $250 to manufacture.
Correction: The hardware components and materials that make up the 16GB iPad cost under $250. There's a big difference. (That big difference includes assembly, testing, packaging, shipping, and amortization of design and software development costs.)
'We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,' Don-joo said. 'Apple made it very thin. We make it very smooth.'
He continued, "Many days no business come to my hut, but Don-joo has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung."
Hi Soulskill, this is great information for the consumer. This will force iPad competitors to rethink their strategy and try to come out with a superior product at a lower price. Which I think as of yet has not happened. In your post you stated that the features were inadequate for the Samsung version, 'We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,' Don-joo said. 'Apple made it very thin.' What do you think are some other possible inadequacies as far as features are concerned? I can think of just a couple off the top of my head like say face-time, the long battery life, and say the built in protective cover. Don't you think Samsung should be seriously rethinking their plan altogether? And can they offer something better for cheaper?
I honestly don't understand Samsung's, Motorola's, RIM's, and HP's pricing on these things. If you're going to spend $500-$800 on a tablet, you're 90% likely to go with the market leader who has not just the most mature product, but the one that is also among the absolute fastest and with the largest application and user base.
So, why not take advantage of the opportunity and start pricing these at $300? After 4 quarters, investors might be pissed at the capital loss of selling millions of units, but at least you'll have an ecosystem. Will there be a Galaxy Tab or Xoom ecosystem? One that is as rich as Apple's?
Are these other tablet makers really this short sighted? Forego the big win to make chump change?
Isn't it a contradiction to both buy in bulk (projecting huge demand) and at the same time describe them as "lean manufacturing?" Manufacturing isn't my business, but I thought "lean" meant "just-in-time", not buy-in-bulk.
Just because they are buying in bulk doesn't mean the parts are sitting in a warehouse somewhere ready to ship. Instead picture an order for ten million components, to be delivered at five hundred thousand a month for twenty months. Most of those parts are going to come off the production line only days or weeks before they end up in the final product, but the order was bulk.
They have NOTHING on the market right now. When their stuff's actually out, Apple can simply release a new OS version. In fact they might already have one ready, since unlike HP and BB they don't do vaporware.
They look like toys compare to the iPad — very buggy toys. And none of them even compares to the iPad in the one feature at made me buy one: 10h battery life. And that's not even mentioning the touchscreen quality.
The truth is that the current of Android tablets are WAY overspecced. You're not going to beat Apple by selling something which costs more than an Apple and there is no need to either. If an Archos 101 can retail for $300 and deliver a 10" capacitive android tablet in a decent form factor with decent features & expansion capabilities then why can't other manufacturers?
To me it looks like Motorola / Samsung are chasing a market that barely exists and sales will reflect that. I expect as the year progresses we'll see Android 3.0 tablets at more sane price points (maybe even a successor to the 101 which is compliant with the Android CDD), but I will not be shocked if Xoom / Tab sales are tagged "disappointing".
Ars Technica reviewed the Xoom and it came out sounding like another typical shipped to early product laden with buggy software. From crashing apps to an expensive tablet with many advertised features not working, one of which requires the owner to ship it back to Motorola to enable!
The market is not being helped by products like the Xoom nor Honeycomb being in the state it is. Instead of stealing the iPad2's thunder they emphasize how much more refined it is and come off instead looking like cheap knockoffs, without the cheap price.
As for their pricing, well if you can't beat the user experience of the iPad you damn well better stomp it in pricing. Which means putting models a full hundred bucks under the iPad in pricing with the same form factor. Don't let people compare them side by side and give them obvious reasons to stick with the iPad. That means a good STABLE interface and the same size.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When will they learn that its about the software not the hardware?
Apple took a gamble in predicting sales of over 10 million, and decided to amortise development costs and order components based on those volumes. They were right...they could have afforded to be wrong. Motorola and Samsung presumably see tablets as a very niche market, so the "tablet division" is expected to work like a normal product and make money on the usual volume ramp up. They are trying to amortise R&D over maybe a million units, and ordering based on that. That is a triple hit; parts are more expensive than netbooks, serious software development is needed, and economies of scale aren't good enough.
You really shouldn't comment on electronics manufacturing unless you actually know what you're talking about, and I'm afraid you don't.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"Lee Don-joo" is a Korean name, and the surname is "Lee."
.dse.dd.
Doesn't Apple by the iPad screens from Samsung?
Yes it is. Competition on features/spec is just one facet. There are many other dimensions, price and availability being the obvious two.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wonder why people forget about all the money Apple get from software/media sales.
Maybe it doesn't do much than covering the costs, or it's too hard to separate (in the case of iTune) ?
http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110305/samsungs-10-inch-tablet-to-ship-as-announced-despite-apples-ipad-2-announcement/?mod=ATD_rss
“We will continue to make every effort to provide the most powerful, well-designed and productive mobile device to customers,” Executive Vice President Lee Don-Joo is quoted by Yonhap as saying.
A Samsung spokesman told the outlet the release plan for the Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 has not been affected, but declined to say when the device will ship.
Samsung's problem is all they have to offer is an open orfice OS and software which is like inviting everyone to have at you.
A quarter million already rue the day they bent over by grabing Android.
Now they have an infection they may never fully recover from.
>>"Apple wants to own the tablet space. So far... they do" I work at a college, and I hardly ever see an Apple tablet. Most tablets I've seen are COBYs or some other Android variant. In my area, Apple products are too pricey. My boss's wife has one, and we bought a couple to test (handed out to faculty), but that's the only ones (iPad) I've seen.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock