HP Officially Out of TouchPads

First time accepted submitter AtomicAdam writes "I guess all that waiting and hoping was in vain. HP just sent out an email officially claiming to be out of TouchPads. 'Dear Valued Customer: Making sure customers have a positive experience when they purchase our products is a priority for us. In some cases, limited inventory makes it challenging to fulfill all customer orders. As you signed up for updates on the HP TouchPad, we wanted you to know that we are officially out of stock. Some retailers will have some stock available, but our online inventory is depleted.'"

Comments

Re:Price Point

[dgatwood]

No, it's proof that people will only buy non-apple tablets when they can get $500 of hardware for $100.

No, it's proof that when you have two products at the same price point, one of which is inferior in almost every way—bigger, heavier, no rear-facing camera, slower CPU (or maybe it's just the higher overhead of WebOS), no native apps, limited selection of apps, less display brightness—people will choose the better product.... About the only hardware advantage the TouchPad had was stereo speakers....

If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.

If you're going to compete at a price point, you have to at least come close to hitting all the major bullet-point hardware features of the other products at that price point. If not, expect your sales to be disappointing. The only time this isn't true is if you have some other major design enhancement that blows away the competition in some other area, and even then, it takes years for something that subtle to result in significant disruption in an established market. It's unclear whether HP had that with WebOS. What is clear is that they were not willing to stick it out in that market long enough to find out.