

Tablet Market: 95% iPad, 5% Everyone Else - Garbage
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tablet_market_95_ipad_5_everyone_else.php

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jerf
Tablet market: 2% iPad, .5% everyone else, 97.5% people who will buy a tablet
but haven't bought one yet. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really do think
this is the better way to think about the market right now. A market of one
credible contender is not enough to draw conclusions about what will happen
when there are more. (Android will _soon_ be credible but I'm not sure it's
there yet.)

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bryanlarsen
The poster should have quoted both titles in the article:

"Tablet Market: 95% iPad, 5% Everyone Else; Things Will Change in Q4 2010"

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ryandvm
Surely this surprises no one. The tablet market was dead for years until Apple
showed us all how beautiful a tablet appliance could be. It's about to get
very competitive and it will play out just like smartphones. Apple blew
everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners had finally
honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged towards the
luxury niche they're so comfortable with.

It happened with their computers. It's happening with phones. And it will
happen with tablets.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being an industry trend setter and
purveyor of luxury computing appliances is an enviable enough existence.

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ergo98
_The tablet market was dead for years_

Aside from a robust but small market in PMPs (by companies like Archos), the
"tablet" market is but an offshot of the netbook market: People just wanted to
browse the web and consume media, and the iPad is Apple's entrant into that
realm.

The Netbook market was all the rage until Apple decided to essentially hop on
that bandwagon. Netbooks have suffered because the iPad is a decent competitor
and brings some of the advantages of being a much lighter internet appliance
of the sort that Andreeson really dreamed of.

Heck, you could even say that the iPad was a me-too entrant in the eReader
market. While this has been largely forgotten, when the iPad was introduced
the comparative focus, including by Apple, was against products like the
Kindle and the Nook.

 _Apple blew everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners
had finally honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged
towards the luxury niche they're so comfortable with._

Luxury? Really?

People with McJobs have iPhones. It isn't a luxury item. Apple sells products
at or below the low price end in virtually every market they touch.

They are the perfect definition of a mass-market, consumer product company.

In any case, after leveraging the huge ecosystem of iPod tie-ins and
mindspace, Apple managed some good inroads into a quickly evolving smartphone
market (which, it should be noted, they feared would take away from their MP3
player market). They got some good momentum, but now they're seeing vigorous
competition.

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tocomment
Somewhat offtopic but I'm curious, is it possible to have a resistive
touchscreen and capacative on the same tablet?

Then you get the best of both worlds, and could use a stylus for fine input,
and your finger for navigation, etc.

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lreeves
I believe there's quite a few companies selling styluses that work with the
iPad.

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grinich
Yes, but it feels like you're writing with a dull Sharpie.

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jonnathanson
When are we going to acknowledge that distinctions like "tablet" are
anachronistic in the first place?

It's all about the software platform. I'm sure the folks at Google make little
philosophical distinction between the Android "tablet" software and the
Android "mobile" software, for instance. Nor does Apple call its iPad OS a
totally different name than it calls its iPhone OS. Other than some minor
cosmetic differences, the code is 99.9% the same.

Tracking share in the "tablet" market is going to seem very silly in a few
years.

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bitsm
Mobile devices are tied quite tightly to carriers (at least in the US).
Tablets are not. I think that's probably enough of a distinction to warrant
tracking them as separate markets.

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jonnathanson
Fair point, though I wonder whether those dynamics will shift in the coming
years -- either for or against the carriers. What's funny is that I could see
the balance of power going in either direction in the US. Either way, it'll be
fascinating to watch.

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kenjackson
Is this counting Windows? In 2008 there were 1.3 million Windows tablets sold.
Not sure of 2009/2010 data. But even at 1M that puts them at much larger than
5%.

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saurik
"Tablets" use pens as input: the iPad is a "pad". Some may claim that "tablet"
is a generic term for this form factor of device, but the correct term would
be "slate". Please note that Apple never uses the term "tablet" to describe
this device: not because they are being "different", but because they really
don't sell a "tablet".

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cryptoz
Wikipedia disagrees with you.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer>

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GHFigs
What's funny is that article was just a redirect to "Tablet PC" until about a
month after the iPad was announced.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tablet_computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tablet_computer&action=historysubmit&diff=349233651&oldid=41011656)

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saurik
Yeah: people are redefining the term "tablet" in order to allow for market
comparisons between the iPad and Tablet PCs. As far as I can tell, the iPad
exists in a different market segment than true tablets: it isn't fun, however,
unless you can define the world in terms of conflict.

(As another example, people are now trying to compare the $1300 (due to memory
and CPU upgrades) 11" MacBook Air I just bought to the $250 HP mini (bought on
a lark when my ThinkPad X61 failed during a conference), as if they were
/directly/ competing for the same users.)

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AndrewDucker
To be honest, all of the Android tablets I've seen so far have been
underwhelming (and I'm holding out for a decent one). The Galaxy Tab isn't too
bad, but it's small and overpriced. The best one I've seen is the Archos 101,
and that still needs work.

I'm hoping that next year sees some decent contenders.

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cryptoz
The reason that Android tablets don't seem to be any good is that Google never
intended Android to run on tablets at all. Chrome OS is the netbook and tablet
OS, while Android is the phone OS.

Android's openness lets anyone put it anywhere so of course we'll see Android
tablets, especially given that Chrome OS isn't officially out yet (this month,
though, right?)

Anyway, yeah, next year should have a lot of Google-related free software
tablets, either Chrome OS or Android.

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AndrewDucker
Naah. Galaxy Tab shows that it can be done.

The reason most of the Android tablets I've seen so far have been rubbish is
that they've had resistive screens and slow processors.

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oceanician
What market share does the Apple Newton have ? ;)

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powrtoch
Completely off topic, sorry but I have to share this: Reading this comment, it
clicked for the first time ever that "Apple Newton" is a pun.

Wow.

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threepointone
also - Pippin, Macintosh :)

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43P04T34
A thousand or a million people using tablets to do their 'INDIVIDUAL' thing is
not at all impressive.

What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using tablets
to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for
everyone in the group.

From this perspective Apple has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded
spectacularly for the people who work at Apple and who have Apple shares to
sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a
greater amount of money.

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mhw
"A thousand or a million people using [product X] to do their 'INDIVIDUAL'
thing is not at all impressive.

What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using
[product X] to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something
beneficial for everyone in the group.

From this perspective [company Y] has utterly failed us even as it has
succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at [company Y] and who have
[company Y] shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares
to yet others for a greater amount of money."

It seems that by these measures you would be disappointed with any combination
of product X and company Y producing it. 'Cars' and 'Ford', 'Android Phones'
and 'Google', etc.. So, what was your point again?

