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RIM Drops Playbook Price By 66%
YokimaSun writes "Following on from the news that RIM's partner was pulling the plug on its BlackBerry phones, RIM announced it was discontinuing the 16GB version of its playbook, PC Gaming News are reporting that the PlayBook is being discounted down by as much as 66% which is adding to the demise of RIM's attempt at the tablet market. Can anything stop the all conquering iPad?"
Lose the fixation on price.
Seriously, it's dangerous. The entire PC industry has spent twenty years concentrating on "Cheaper! Cheaper! Cheaper!", look where it's got us. About the only company in the computer industry that's really making good money is the one that doesn't repeat "Cheaper!" like some sort of mantra. Most of the others are making spectacularly low profits considering their turnover.
Yes, it will all be nullified by the bankruptcy proceedings.
How is reporting on an eBay sale (for the second time in what two, three days) "news" of any kind, much less for nerds?
Now that it's happened twice, I wonder if /. is hurting so bad that they must resort to advertising stuff their putting on eBay.
What's next, IBM is in trouble because you can find PCjrs on Craigslist for under $1.00?
C'mon guys, pull it together,
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Free prostate exams?
When RIM launched the playbook it didn't have native email apps for security reasons. In order to use email and calendaring you had to own a blackberry and tether it or something like that. This lead to a lot of confusion on what it's internet capabilities actually were. See here for some details: http://crackberry.com/why-rim-launching-blackberry-playbook-without-native-email-client-and-why-may-or-may-not-matter-you
The entire PC industry has spent twenty years concentrating on "Cheaper! Cheaper! Cheaper!", look where it's got us.
It took the price of a desktop PC from about $3600 to about $500 (in 2010 dollars) over that period, all while massively improving the technology. Yeah, that's a real loss.
See, here's the thing: What's a loss for the PC industry in terms of higher margins is a win for every industry and consumer that uses PCs for anything. That competitive pressure would cause the price to go down isn't a flaw, it's capitalism doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
I am officially gone from
I know business degrees don't usually require you to know how to count, but it's the first time I've seen marketshare stats touted around that add up to 111%.
As much as I'd like that to be the case (competition is good), I'd have issue trusting numbers with such flaws. Either it's quoted out of context or the people who did it flunk stats 101.
I bought a Playbook just before Christmas when the price dropped to £169 but have just bought an iPad to replace it. The PB hardware and OS are good, what killed it for me were the apps. There's no Kindle, Skype or Netflix, for example, and on the BB app store $1 = £1, so what apps there are felt pricey.
Who cares?
If the only way these things will sell is at firesale prices, then you can guarantee that there will be no long term supply, hence not worth the ongoing efforts of a developer. Just bury them in the desert next to the unused Atari cartridges and move on with your life.
It amazes me how much trouble companies go through in order to avoid using free software. Just amazing. Apple did it but they locked it up by going with only BSD stuff. HP and RIM both avoided Android hoping that Android didn't matter as much as having "a tablet" did. (Hello? How long have you guys been working in the technology industries? Software is ALWAYS more important than the hardware.) Nokia did it too. They wanted to create their own thing... what? Twice? Three times? Now, still trying to avoid Android, they went with Microsoft?
This sort of denial is a kind of poison which should be used to kill CEOs of these companies. They should all be smarter than that.
Only one company has historically ever gotten away with the tactic of creating their own software/hardware ecosystem. That company is Apple. But in exchange for their success in this, they have to accept their limited corner while the bustling world of business goes on all around them.
I think there are a few reasons why RIM didn't catch up.
Part of it was complacency. Upper management believed for far too long that RIM was unbeatable, and by the time they actually changed course it was too late.
Part of it was a lack of talent. RIM tried to make an all touch screen phone early on (the Storm came out in 2008) and it was terrible. By the Storm 2 it was obvious that the development team at RIM couldn't handle a keypad-less world, and that BB's OS couldn't keep up with the iPhone.
Part of it was poor choices. RIM worked to change OSes to fix that fact that the old BB OS didn't handle touch very well, but they made the mistake of biting on the iPad hype and they put out a tablet with the new OS before a smartphone with the new OS. The tablet failed miserably, which lost all momentum for RIM's new platform.
Part of it was a lack of vision. RIM has had some good ideas, they just lack the vision to take them that extra step. They had the first great communication platform with BBM, but they didn't think to make it seamless with texting like Apple did iMessage. They basically had the popular Kindle Fire before Amazon did, but they didn't think to try and take the "cheaper than iPad market" until it was too late.
And finally part of it was the market they catered to. Business users are often not a fan of rapid change, especially if that means the IT department has to redo how executives get their email every year. RIM ignored the consumer market for too long- when the iPhone started getting tons of fun apps you got the sense that RIM was happy its phone wasn't a "toy." By the time Apple's "toy" had added in some business functionality to encompass RIM's target market, RIM had nothing fun to offer consumers and fight Apple on their own turf. By the time they had their fun "toy" device (the Playbook, its in the name) they had to rush it out so quickly that it completely didn't fit their core market (it didn't even have email). Hence today's news.
Open Source Sushi
Nope ... it's just the editor trolling for comments, for the story itself isn't that interesting. This has been happening a lot since Malda left. Apple has become a rather polarizing issue on slashdot so any article with even the slightest mention of Apple tends to draw a lot of people out of the woodwork to throw feces at each other. It must be great for ad revenue, but as a long time reader, I'm quite bored with it and find myself skipping over a lot Apple related discussion even though I'm an iOS dev.
These days I find myself more at Ars than I do here which is a shame since I used value the discussions here in such high regard. Oh well.
I got a 16Gb the first time they were deeply discounted.
It was a little buggy at first, but the OS2.0 update completely fixed that.
It's blazing fast, multitasks, plays Flash, is a decent form factor, and gets incredible battery life. And now it runs Android apps to (I ported Androku over to it to run my Soundbridge - easy)
For as much as people seem to love throwing rocks at RIM, the Playbook is a great product.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Take a fucking guess.
The RIM tablet doesn't really add anything over and above other 7" tablets that might run Android. Kindle Fire and Nook Color devices can be had for less. All of those really need work with third party firmware to be made legitimately worthwhile.
I own a whole bunch of tablets, including a (work-provided) ipad2 and several options from first-tier Android OEMs. In general, the best use I've found for them is consumption of ebooks, webcomics and product manuals. My favorite device is an 8.9" Samsung Galaxy, which has the 1280x800 screen resolution of a larger Android tablet but weighs about 2/3rds what the 1" larger ipad2 does. That's a lovely combination of form factor and usability.
I guess I could get away with doing the same things on my phone as I do with my tablets, but a 4.3" screen really doesn't have the same level of utility as a 7" or larger one.
And regarding your question, I'm sufficiently annoyed by all the drawbacks to iOS that I would never consider purchasing an Apple device for myself. Data sandboxing and format limitations drive me insane.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K