[vidarh]

> Apple happened to enter the market first

They didn't even do that. They entered a market that was created well over a decade ago but that was reduced to a tiny niche because limitations in the early models had scared companies off from trying to make them consumer devices any more.

They deserve a lot of credit for getting the timing right and putting together a very polished consumer product far superior to the extremely niche competitors that were left in that market, but the idea was old already when the tablet market started taking off for a short lived fad last time, around '99.

(in the interest of disclosure: I worked on a tablet in '99 until early 2000; it was fun. Definitively not something comparable to the iPad, but I still wish we'd have pulled it off - company kept trying a few years after I left, but getting funding for a decent sized production run turned out to be a far bigger challenge than actually designing the thing)