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Tablet Makers Try To Beat iPad's $500 Pricetag
The iPad has sold extremely well at a starting price of $500 but "that kind of pricing doesn't work for many tablet vendors," says a story at CNET. And recent price drops reflect this. It's been a rough year for tablet makers, and it's not even Black Friday yet.
There has never been an "tablet market". There is an "ipad market" now. It didn't exist when Apple initially launched the iPad, but they managed to "open the market" (clearly that legion of loyal fans had a role on that).
The rest of the vendors don't have that critical mass of early adopters, and/or their product isn't as good (or perceived as good) as the iPad.
The people who can afford them, pick iPads, or nothing at all. The rest of us have higher priorities than buying second-class tablets.
Except iOS devices aren't loss leaders for Apple. Apple makes a negligible amount of profit off of its App Store. The bulk of Apple's profit comes from every device that goes out the door—whether it's paid for by you or by a combination of you and your mobile carrier.
1) iPad most definitely *not* sold at a loss - nowhere close.
2) iTunes Store/App Store run at very minimal profit. It is over break even, but not by much.
*sources, Apple's officially filed financial statements, every year since the launch of the iTunes Store.
The list goes on and on, but all the people who ask the question don't care at all about any of that. Pity, they should.
Why should they? That's a serious question, I'm not trying to troll here or be flamebait.
The demographic for the iPad is completely divorced from the features you have listed as the main reasons you went for a non-iPad tablet, and given that you can get those other types of tablets, and the users getting iPads are also getting what they want, why should they care?
If they want to program on it, or run Python apps, or install custom firmwares and so on, then there's a market that already caters to that. If they want what the iPad does, then they have the iPad.
Just because the iPad doesn't fit your use case doesn't mean that anyone who doesn't want to do the things you do with computing equipment is somehow wrong, or that they should care about what you care about.
If you believe the iPad isn't sold at a loss, then I have a bridge to sell you.
If you believe it is sold at a lost you would be an idiot. Here are some facts.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/07/19Apple-Reports-Third-Quarter-Results.html
From q2 2011 to q3 2011 Apples revenue decreased in the App Store, iTunes Stores. Yet their profit increased from q2 to q3. Now how can it be that they had decreased revenue and increased profit if they according to you make the bulk of their profit off these ventures and not the hardware which had increases in revenue?
I can program it without paying a fee.
You can program the iPad without paying a fee. There's a fee if you want to publish to the store, however.
To get the best tools for developing for iOS, it's true that you want a Mac with Xcode, but it's not your only option anymore.
It's open source.
Could you point me to the Honeycomb source? Last I heard, it's never going to be available.
It's Linux.
Why is this valuable? The kernel that runs the Thrive is Linux, but that's almost completely irrelevant. For underlying OS code, I'm going to prefer that which does the job best. That might be Linux, or it might be something else. "It's Linux," smacks of the same kind of kool-aid drinking of which Apple users are so often accused.
I can run Python apps.
Certainly a nifty feature. However why should "all the people who ask the question" care about that? How many of them are going to care? Almost every one of them will just use apps from the Market.
I'm not hating on the Thrive, which looks like a very decent tablet. I'm just sick of the FUD, and I'm really tired of hearing about how open Android is, when it really doesn't follow FOSS principles at all. Most Android phones have to be hacked just like iPhones in order to replace the ROM. On those which don't, you lose all claim to a warranty (absent consumer protections to the contrary, which you'd have to fight in court in order to keep.)
Android is open in the same way that TiVo is open. You might be able to see the source (not so on 3.1, apparently) but you likely won't be able to modify it and run it on your device.
"Go to a university or place where the younger crowd hangs. Take a look around. Open your eyes. Then come back and tell me what you see *on average*, not under some one-off Linux nerd's desk."
Exactly, I went to a hipster cafe and I saw ZERO desktops being carried around. Oh, wait...
The bulk of Apple's profit comes from every device that goes out the door—whether it's paid for by you or by a combination of you and your mobile carrier.
Don't worry, you pay 100% the cost of your iPhone. Your mobile carrier is nice enough to loan you the bulk of the purchase price and then extract it from you over the course of a 2-year contract, at an unspecified interest rate. It's similar to loan sharking, except there's no disclosure. :)
How is that different from any other phone that the carrier sells? In fact, the carrier pays a larger subsidy for $200 iPhone than a $200 Android device and the customer still pays the same monthly amount for the same service.
It's when two operating systems fight to the death for the privilege of running on a piece of hardware.
It's funny how you often see Apple fans saying this. But then when someone suggests that Apple should be regulated as a monopoly for its abusive practices surrounding its walled-garden, the fans' tunes immediately change (and I'm not addressing you in particular), and they say nooo there's a thriving ecosystem full of competition.
Though frankly, I think that the latter might be true. A year ago, people were saying that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market, and Apple's market share was hovering around 95% in tablets. At the last keynote, Apple was trumpeting that they control 75% of the market share in tablets. Losing 20% market share in a single year is actually pretty startling.
Now of course they had nowhere to go but down from 95%, but at 75% I think there actually is a tablet market, and not an iPad market, and any heavy-handed government regulation is probably uncalled for.
Apple made 7 billion in profit in the second quarter of 2011 alone - 500 million over the course of a year (or over the course of 3 ish years, give or take a bit up or down - the app store has been open for three years and has paid 2.5 billion to developers [that's the 70%]). It's certainly not coming from the App Store if they do a 30/70 split (as famously derided on here often) and the 70% side of that split adds up to 2.5 billion.
Like I said, the store does turn a profit, but it is *enormously* dwarfed by the profits from hardware sales - ie, my point was to refute the GP's argument that not only are Apple making their 16 billion in annual profit mainly from "iTunes/app store content sales by skimming off the top", but that they're also selling the iPad at a loss which is why no one else can make a cheaper tablet.
In other words, his arguments are total nonsense. The iTunes Store and the App Store exist to drive hardware sales, not the other way around.
But if your argument is "I won't buy Apple because they outsource their manufacturing to the third world" then using an Android tablet is hardly taking the high ground.
Your arguments were not based on moral issues though - you were purely talking about the function of the device (unless we go down the road that Free Software is a moral issue, but assuming it's one of a couple of choices for a moment), so conflating this with the issues of globalisation and worker and environmental exploitation seems disingenuous, since in that respect there's not much to choose between any electronics manufacturer (that's not to say it's ok, or that we shouldn't continue to push for a better situation).
Your initial argument essentially boiled down to "people who bought iPads should care that the iPad is not like the Thrive", but I have to wonder why, given that both products are available, serving very different demographics.
Some of the Android tablets are quite nice. Particularly the Asus Transformer, the Acer Iconia Tab, the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Any day now the Tegra 3 models will be out and they promise to be astounding. For myself I prefer the widescreen layout.
Yes, the iPad is doing very well. That doesn't mean there's no hope for others. Agree about HP, RIM, Cisco and some of the others looking to put their own proprietary spin on things.
There's also huge demand for the lower-end Android tablet in places where money is harder to get. There are places in this world where the $500 entry price for an iPad is just too much money. It's easy enough to say that if you can't get the good one, do without - but the lesser things can still be darned useful. It's nice that there are hundreds of alternatives for those folks to use.
Help stamp out iliturcy.