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Apple's Secret Weapon To Win the Tablet Wars
Hugh Pickens writes "International Business Times reports that when manufacturers trotted out their Android tablet prototypes during the CES show two months ago, pundits were happy to toll the death knell for the Apple's iPad, but now manufacturers are discovering that simply making a good tablet does not guarantee that it will sell — much to the chagrin of Motorola and its Xoom product. Now it is plain for all to see that Apple's secret weapon is their network of dedicated Apple stores worldwide where dedicated sales people are not only able to better explain its tablet to consumers but Apple also captures more margin than competitors who have to share margin with retail partners. Apparently, we are not going to see a repeat of the Android ambush of the smartphone market where the combined, price, savvy marketing, and modulated supply releases of the iPhone created so much aspirational demand in the market that buyers simply surged at the chance to buy what was perceived to be an equivalent product at lower prices. 'Motorola's Xoom is only the first to face these problems,' writes AA Defensor. 'Soon RIM's Playbook, and HP's TouchPad will hit the shelves and unless they can do something drastic over the short term, it might remain to be an iPad market. But not because they did not build a good product.'"
If that's true, then the Microsoft guy might have been right. That tablets computers are a fad that will fade into a niche product that isn't worth their time to pursue.
That would make it the first time in many years that the world "Microsoft might have been right" have appeared in a sentence written by me. I feel a chill. Is the world ending?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Did they hire Moses as their campaign manager? That guy was a whiz at promoting tablets.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Apple's secret weapon is their network of dedicated Apple stores worldwide
No, their secret weapon is their network of dedicated Apple *users* worldwide. Many (not all, but many) Apple fans have an almost cult-like dedication to Apple products, and are also pretty effective proselytizers for the cause. Motorola, HP, etc. don't have that kind of advantage, no matter how good their product.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If the solution is to start building retail stores and hiring people to explain the products like Apple does, then go for it! Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Acer, ViewSonic, etc. should build their own stores and sell the products directly. They'd get wider margins, which means they can offer at slightly lower prices. Additionally, people are pulling away from the carrier centric model, because quite frankly, most carriers treat their customers horribly because they know that they can. Customers are not inclined to judge products solely on the product like they do for Apple devices because there's no clear separation of the product from the carrier. Most people's logic is something like: "Oh, AT&T is terrible, that means all the devices that run on AT&T's network are bad too." While their Android devices have some serious suckage, in general the device does not equal the carrier in suckage. Unfortunately, that's how must people think.
Decoupling the device from the carrier is the best way to fix this problem.
The secret weapon is obvious -
Its making apple products look 'cool' and special - in part because of their price, and in part because of their 'magical exclusivity'. The dedicated apple stores do help. But not because of the profit margins.
If apple were to sell a brick, they would sell much more than a normal brick, because of the 'prestige' that buying an apple product brings.
It is WAY to early to make this kind of a judgement. There is absolutely no reason why Android couldn't take over tablets as well as smartphones. Judging by the success or failure of a first gen product like the Xoom is definitely not an adequate representation.
when people talk about the success of Apple, where they always focus on singular Apple products and techgeeks especially zoom in on specs and the like.
It means a lot to be able to walk into a store and have people actually help you. The trend is usually towards superstores where there is a million and one products which nobody knows anything about anything. Even in Best Buy, where I usually avoid/ignore the sale's people, when I do take advantage of their nagging "Can I help you", the inevitably don't know anything about the products they're selling, even in their department, and read to you from the box as if you're illiterate. (I asked a salesperson in that department if a specific computer case fit ATX sized boards because it looked a bit small. Total deer in the headlights look. Box didn't say anything.)
The closest I've come irl people knowing, is at microcenter, although mine the salespeople are so pushy it's uncomfortable. But it can be a powerful thing for a brand. I know Sony has stores and Gateway tried them the last decade, but not sure what became of them.
Your product will FAIL if it's priced higher than the "premium" product that is out there.
Yes the new Motorola tablet is better than an Ipad, but it is not PERCIEVED as being a luxury item like the iPad has become.
Have an iPad? you must be rich. no really, it has that "feel" that has been perpetuated by apple.
The only way the Android competition can touch the iPad is to be cheaper and get units out there that are BETTER than the ipad. not cheap knockoffs that are half baked... Like the ones that dont have a legitimate Market app on them.
IF your tablet does not ship with Market ready to be used, your tablet is a fail. If your tablet does not ship with honeycomb or at least a 2.2 android and can be upgraded to the latest easily.... then your tablet is a FAIL.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The stores are crowded
That should probably tell you something right there. Apple stores are hip. They're like that really exclusive dance club that everyone seems to want to get into. Once you're inside, it's crowded and hot, the DJ sucks, the drinks are overpriced--yet people will line up around the block just to beg the bouncer to get in.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Really... Mine was not, I sat naked in front of my computer with a bowl of jello, clicked a couple of things and my tablet was delivered the next day to my home. IT was a fantastic retail experience...
What, I was hot and hungry...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Apple is a software company and the fact that it comes inside a piece of complimentary hardware is not really that important. But look up what Mr. Kay had to say about the companies that are "serious about their software" some decades ago.
As for "Apple's secret weapon is their network of dedicated Apple stores worldwide" - well, there are ZERO of them here in Russia. iPads and stuff are still VERY popular.
Wen I use a computer, I want raw power. A PC with Ubuntu will do. With windows... mostly .. I get angry at the lack of decent virtual desktop,but is almost there.
But wen I want a tablet, I want usability. And Apple has that. I don't need my tablet to have 16 GB of RAM or any other stat. Is not about stat, is about the experience, and Apple has it. I suppose Android can get here, but I am unsure if thats what the Android people ask for... maybe Android is taking notes from Windows, and not from iOS.
-Woof woof woof!
And if you go into the men's room, you'll see four feet in one stall. Yep, that's the Apple Store, all right.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, there is your problem. Of your 3 tasks listed, only 1 of them is something that a normal person is only likely ever to do.
So you come out walking like a duck? Jeez, in my day, even twelve inches was an exaggeration.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
But I don't understand the use cases for finger-only tablets. ... . Does anyone have experiences with these fingery tablets?
90% of my ipad time is clicking delete on almost all emails, scrolling and reading some emails. Its a really easy choice, wait five minutes for the PC to boot up and anti-virus to finish and log in, click thru todays firefox upgrade and windows "upgrade", etc etc, or five seconds on the ipad till I do what I want. Regardless of CPU speed, latency makes PCs incredibly slow compared to an ipad.
It makes a pretty good web-shopping platform on the couch. Peapod, Amazon, etc. Again, instant latency compared to a PC, and no virus/security issues.
Very star trek tablet web page viewing experience. Pick up, look at local weather radar, local weather forecast, stocks, bank account, whatever, then put down. No upgrading / virus scanning / latency drama, its just there and ready for me instantly.
Makes a great ebook reader. Some awesome fast and smooth pdf readers and CBZ/CBR comic book reading apps.
Generally speaking the experience on a tablet places the user in the drivers seat, whereas the experience on a non-linux desktop/laptop/netbook places the device in the drivers seat with the user as a passenger.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Apple's iPad is compelling to the public (and difficult to sell) because it's not a PC and it's not a phone. It really is something different.
Android is selling because people know what they're buying: a phone. The basic uses are pretty obvious. You don't need a lot of marketing, etc to understand. It may be that "Android" itself is irrelevant - it's a cheap OS that's being promoted as the secret sauce, but who knows if the public cares about the sauce or the price.
The iPad, as you can see from the comments here, is a bit harder to pigeonhole. It's not a laptop, even though it's portable. It's not a "computer" as it's known today. It's not a TV.
However, you can watch TV on it (MLB, Cablevision, Netflix, AirVideo, YouTube, etc). You can check email. You can play games, make music, etc. You can do lots of stuff with it. It's basically the equivalent of a portable Apple ][, in that it's a "Personal Computer." The rest of the industry has no idea what that means. Most technical people have no idea what that means either.
If I was to coin a phrase, it's a "casual computer." What do I do with my iPad? Play games. Check email. Do a quick browse with Pulse across 75 websites. Take notes and organize my thoughts. FaceTime occasionally. There are things my MBP does better, and that my desktop(s) do better. That's not the point.
But the key thing is, the casual use cases are what most people use their home computers for. Very few people write papers on their home computers. Very few people write anything in real life, except forum posts, facebook/myspace comments, IM/chats, and emails. Very few people write code, do spreadsheets, or any of the thousands of things that require an i7 or a core 2 duo.
It's the "Computer for the rest of us", and the rest of us means "people that aren't computer people." Geeks think it's ridiculous, but anyone who's been paying attention to computing is aware that the public thinks PCs are too hard to use, too hard to maintain, and too complicated...and if they don't believe it they act that way. How many of us have answered questions that seem completely ridiculous to us? "No, that's not a cupholder."
There really isn't any of that complexity with the iPad. The only really complicated iPad thing is whether the switch is the orientation lock or mute. Do people want heavy-duty games? Not really - most people have lives, and don't have time to invest hours in learning how to play a game. Heavy-duty apps? Probably not - they just want to kick out an email etc. They want to see their data wherever they are. And they want to be entertained. The iPad does those very, very well.
> you know, the only thing that 99% of the world does on computers.
>
> Have you ever gone online on the world-wide-web?
Yup. Did that very thing recently.
Got stonewalled when the information I needed was at a site that was flash only. They hadn't made any special acommodations for PhoneOS, so I my device might have been made out of clay or stone in terms of being useful.
Apple tablets are devices that require constant excuses.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I should hope that people would like a tablet that DOESN'T connect to iTunes. That NOT having to continuously run iTunes software (or helpers) is actually a selling point. It's kind of ironic that people buy svelte wafers to play music / vids and then are forced to sync them with a piece of bloatware. Not only that, but said bloatware deliberately obstructs users and limits what files they're allowed to copy to their own device.
See, what you don't get is, non-geeks don't care.
They don't care that they can't copy arbitrary files to iDevices. What would they do with a zip file or a copy of their Civ 5 saved game on it, anyway? If they want something like a PDF file, there are a number of apps that will display those, and let them copy them over by selecting them in iTunes. I agree the interface is a little clunky, but it doesn't prevent you from copying to an iDevice any file that you can actually use on it.
Furthermore, they don't care that they have to sync it in the first place. Geeks love to bitch about iTunes, but pretty much every non-geek I've talked to that has used it has had no troubles with it.
I certainly don't disagree that iTunes has become more bloated than it perhaps should be, and that Apple should think about breaking the iDevice syncing capabilities out into another application (maybe iSync? ;-) ), but that's the kind of thing that generally only bugs geeks. Most people aren't geeks.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
There is no secret weapon. But a great many obvious ones.
First Mover advantage: You can argue tablet existed before, but until iPad, they didn't for the average consumer. Apple's iPad will be seen as the spark that started a new product niche, they will have mindshare advantage, competitors are left playing catch up and will be largely perceived as iPad knockoffs, that you get because you were too cheap, or unsavvy to get an iPad.
Mature OS vs Beta OS: You can argue about better notifications in Android or some other pet feature, but the reality is that Honeycomb is beta quality. It is unstable, apps are crashing all over the place. You certainly aren't going to win converts with this.
Apple consistently builds top quality HW: Again you quibble about some minor spec sheet improvement some competitor has, but Apple is pretty much a safe bet of deliver top quality HW. If you go with the competition, you will have to dissect spec sheets/reviews to make sure you aren't getting a crappy screen or low battery life, etc...
Ecosystem: 65000 tablet specific applications vs 100...
Unique Killer Apps: Apple is creating a suite of excellent apps that off a cut above anything available for Android Tablets. Garage Band, iMovie, Pages, Number etc..
Marketing: Apple is fairly good at marketing and they are clearly outspending all the competition on tablet marketing..
Mom Factor Think about which one you would get for your Mom? I tried to get my Senior Mom using a PC and it was hopeless, but I think an iPad could work for her and I do think it will be easier with an iPad than an Android tablet.
Against this, the main thing Android tablets seem to have going for them is: Nerd rage about walled gardens and Nerd spec sheet worship. That doesn't seem very relevant this time out. I honestly wouldn't have a clue how to compete against iPad and I doubt any of the competition does either, they are just trying to build comparable HW and hoping.
After some earlier waffling, I am planning to get an iPad as my first Apple product ever.
Maybe there is no real tablet market. Only an Apple gadget market.
=-+
I switched her over to Linux after she kept getting her computer infected. I've tried showing her apps like Scribus, but she hears from friends that Macs are the way to go for graphics. Why listen to her son who works in IT as an engineer when random people on Facebook are more trustworthy?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You can record video and print from an iPad. While you can't visit any arbitrary flash website you can get YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, or any other site that also has an iPad app or uses HTML 5.
Does anyone really claim that the iPad is so much better in the tablet market than the iPhone was in the smartphone market that its unassailable? Nonsense.
Don't forget the first Android phones... the G1 didn't even really try. And while the Droid was a pretty big boost to the "ecosystem", it didn't defeat the iPhone. The only case I can even recall of a single model of Android outselling the iPhone is recently, with the HTC Thunderbolt at Verizon outselling the iPhone 4... a brand new 4G product outselling last year's model.
And yet, even in the USA, Apple's stronghold, Android phones outsold the iPhone last year, and already beat RIM (the only other smartphone vendor to outsell Apple last year in the USA) this year. A market with multiple vendors always wins, in the end. That's why the IBM PC won, why DVD defeated DivX, why Blu-ray defeated HD-DVD, why Compact Flash and SD are the successful memory cards, etc. The only place this doesn't happen is in very limited niches markets only served by a few proprietary customers, or vertically integrated markets with unusual dynamics. The video game console market is an example of that; every vendor takes a loss on the hardware for a new console, only one hardware vendor per platform, etc. So sure, if Applet thinks they can make enough cash on the iTunes store to subsidize the market with super-cheap iPads, they win. But they'll never do it.
Price is an issue, though. Anyone who thinks the iPad is cheap is not paying attention -- the cost to make of any ARM tablet is lower than most netbooks. Apple made nearly as much money on the iPad last year as on the Macintosh. Just the hardware. Why ever change that model.
Some are starting to get the message. As much as Apple sells, they don't actually MAKE any component in the iPad. Samsung makes practically every component for a tablet themselves, including many found in the actual iPad. Is there any possible reason a Samsung tablet needs to cost as much as an iPad? None... they were simply setting the price based on Apple as the only competition. Another datapoint: Archos. They're on their fourth generation tablets now.... evolved out of the PMP world, never directly targeted at Apple. You can buy a 10" Archos with specs better than the iPad 1 for $300. The price, right now, should be keeping people away: ARM tablets at $500 or more look expensive when netbooks start at $200 and, in theory, offer more.
Yes, the iTunes store is a big magnet. It was with the iPhone too... but that didn't keep the iPhone on top. All of those Android users are getting the same kind of things from the Android Market, the Amazon Appstore, and maybe others. If there's really a market for tablets, this growing collection of users will be looking for Android tablets. Today's Xoom is really just the G1, in terms of the way Google's looking at the tablet market (despite the fact Android 2.x is just fine with tablets, I have found only one out of 50 I've tried on my "Adam" tablet didn't support full resolution -- vastly different than the iPad vs. iPhone story).
And that's even assuming something big doesn't happen. But we already know that today's B&N "nook" is getting an official update that will include apps as well as books -- the device is already proving a fine tablet among hackers. And Amazon's certain to release future Kindles with the full Android treatment as well. Neither device may be as open to other appstores as the average smartphone today, we'll see. But the same apps run everywhere.
-Dave Haynie