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Why 2012 Will Be the Year of the Android Tablet
lseltzer writes "The iPad has dominated the high-end tablet market so far, but that is about to change. At CES in Las Vegas in a couple weeks you will see tablets running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) everywhere and at prices that will make an iPad a lot harder to justify. The competition from the OEM model in the Android markets will massively shift market share away from Apple, just as it has done in the smart phone market."
The article seems to presume that there is a static size for the amount of people who buy tablets. There isn't. As lower-cost entries enter the market, people who previously could not afford one will be able to buy one. So the market will grow, but it's also likely that Apple's overall sales will grow as the market grows. So, sure, Apple's "market share" may shrink, but it's not like Apple's going to make less money than they did before.
Also, there seems to be an assumption that people buy a tablet sorely based on cost. That is certainly part of how people buy something, but there are also metrics of quality, ease of use and also what you've got already. If you already have an iProduct, I'll bet people are a lot more attracted to the idea they can plug it into the iTunes that's already set up and have it work. Learning something new probably isn't a big driver, even if they save a hundred bucks. Apple could also drop prices on the iPad 2 when the 3 comes out, just as they have done with the iPhone when new generations have arrived, in order to compete with the lower end of the market.
That... depends a lot. Do they have 40-50% share of a much larger market? Are they am making more, less, or the same amount per unit? I don't think Apple's board, or anyone else, ever expects to dominate any one niche forever. They don't need to. Apple's profits are rising. They make more per phone (and tablet) than any Android manufacturer and sell more units than any Android manufacturer. Their goal is make money, not dominate markets. They *still* make more profits on their computer division than any other single computer manufacturer, despite only being around 6 or 7 percent of the market share. When compared to "Windows PCs", Macs are a small minority of computers. When compared to "Dell PCs", Macs beat all the other manufacturers in sales and make more per unit. Dominating markets is nice, but it's not likely to last. Being a huge player in a much larger market makes just as much money and can last a good long while.
Look at phones. For a while iPhone dominated the smartphone category. Then Android joined the fray. People started buying Android phones too. Eventually more people bought Android phones than iPhones, but here's the thing... More people were buying iPhones than ever before. Every ad for an iPhone is, in a way, and ad for an Android phone. Every ad for an Android phone is, in a way, an ad for an iPhone. Ads for both make people want smartphones, and that's good for everybody. Would you rather have the whole 12 inch diameter pie, or a quarter of a pie the size of a dining room table?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
"Too many tablet models means application developers can't rely on as much being present and have to buy more tablets on which to test."
Just like PCs. I'd hate to be a PC developer these days, and have to buy thousands of them just to make sure my application was fully tested.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Seriously? You must not have seen ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer or the Transformer Prime (I hate how people keep forgetting about that one). How innovative is it for your tablet to dock with a keyboard (which includes goodies like a battery and USB ports) and become kin to a netbook? It's not that ICS will be the catalyst. It's that the convergence of ICS on both Tablet and Phone will make it much easier to sell someone an Android tablet versus an iPad. Got that killer app for your phone? Stick it on your tablet and be even more productive with a big screen.
This shouldn't come to a shock to anyone. Mac except FOR A VERY SHORT period. Has always controlled their hardware (in some cases to their demise).
You have a memory leak. The mac clones almost killed Apple. The problem was that the clones cannibalize sales of Apple macs rather than expanding the marketshare of Mac OS. They were also of worse quality leaving Apple with less sales but higher end user support costs as they had to troubleshoot mac os for those clone owners.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.