I'm sure a lot will say now that "It was inevitable. Android is made up of multiple OEM's, yadda, yadda...".
But I seem to remember not too long ago that "iPad was the iPod of tablets" or something, and therefore will always have 80+ percent market share. I guess that didn't turn out true.
The tablet market is not like the phone market. In many ways, it will be easier for Android to gain market share, since the channel isn't controlled by carriers in some markets. Any OEM can enter this business, and many many will.
Tablets are the post PC device, and the skip-the-PC device.
Tablets will be the inexpensive personal internet access device for Asian markets that now rely on internet cafes. Apple will take only the luxury market here, but will make plenty of money at that.
Tablets will displace PCs from the desks and especially the non-desk-bound workers in enterprises who can't justify the support costs of a PC. Apple will be a stronger contender here because of their long head start, but Android has some technical advantages as well as cost and choice of OEMs.
One thing that's missing is software that takes advantage of tablet power and screen real estate. My prediction is that this will happen first in enterprise software where budgets will support more ambitious software development, and that it's possible it will happen on Android first because it's easier to make a suite of cooperating apps for Android.
Nah, the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today. So that's digital artists, developers with their VMware/VirtualBox/etc and servers. I look to my non-techie dad(though he use to do those punch-card stuff) as an example; got him an iPad and the only thing he misses from his previous laptops is the keyboard.
I'm very interested in what other people think about this. Does the general public need anything more than a high-end tablet + bluetooth keyboard? Or maybe, just because some people enjoy a big screen, a tablet with a docking-station providing the keyboard, mouse and big screen?(which is basically a PC, I guess). Some of my coworkers predict a day where smartphones are so powerful, that you'll just put them in a docking-station at work and it'll be just as powerful as a high-end notebook today.
Today's consumer laptops/desktop are like Adobe Flash. They're both dead and the tech to replace them exists, we just haven't completely agreed on how to go about it - but they are both definitely dead.
> the only people who actually need a laptop/desktop instead of a tablet+bluetoothKeyboard are people who need a lot more power than tablets can provide today
AIDE keeps getting better. There are some things, like GUI-builders, that are devilishly hard to do in a cross-development environment. There is nothing fundamental blocking native development on Android.
That is the relevant question. (What does Post-PC mean?)
Looking back at the PC 'revolution' we see that initially computers were in the office and not so much at home. And if they were at home there was only 1 and generally shared.
But what PC's did was create a place you could deliver an application (the PC provided input/output/storage) for the marginal cost of the software bits (which is quite small). So a tremendous number of companies sprang up to deliver those applications since the rate of return is quite high.
As PC's migrated home, they did so primarily as an application vehicle and less so as a tool. This is markedly different than most of the readership of this site (which uses computers as tools) but it is far and away the largest use for computers in the home and individually owned computers.
The programability came at a price however, it made compatibility challenging (bad mojo to have your app not work on your customers machine) and it enabled a threat to undesired programming (viruses, worms, etc) running on it.
For the biggest chunk of the market, the customer's ideal device has no programmability capability outside an application's need for configuration, no way for any application to interfere with another application, and rock solid compatibility. Sort of the 'game console' equivalent of information appliance.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all gunning for that space (and apparently so is Valve :-). Apple's approach is an appliance OS (iOS) and a developer OS (MacOS), Google's approach is an appliance OS (ChromeOS) and developer tools (Chrome, AppEngine, Etc.), Microsoft has the developer OS (Windows) with what might be called the third attempt at an appliance version (Windows RT) (previously Windows CE and Windows Embedded).
If these efforts mature the way their respective owners would like, the bulk of the "computers" out there will be information/data appliances running their appliance environment. Computers will go back to something nerds, scientists. and engineers use and "regular" people ignore.
Ops! Typing on an iPhone, tried to edit and hit send by accident :) I meant file system, which is key for any kind of real work on device. For instance, on an Android I can save a PDF file in say Work folder, then open it in one app to annotated it, in other to perhaps rotate some pages and rearrange content, and finally compress along with other files into a single zip and email it out.
In theory, I could do the same on an iPad, but it would be a really convoluted string of passing that file from app to app, as appose of have that file in one place and using different apps as tools, to work on that file.
With all the hard work apple is doing trying to make OSX users think that their hard drive starts at the ~/ folder, I don't expect full system excess here, just a Document folder and a Finder.app to manage it.
I own an Asus TS300 tablet, and one thing comes to my mind, Android is mediocre, I've tried the iPad and the Surface and their quality is 10 times better, so I presume this numbers are due the cheap $59 tablets that have become popular, but just for the price.
I enjoy using my Nexus 7 over my iPad mini and 3rd generation iPad. The apps aren't at parity, but I think the OS is a lot more fluid and easy to navigate.
My Nexus 7 is sitting in its dock, as it has been for the last six weeks except for maybe a few minutes a week.
I bought one of the original 16GB Nexus 7s; the battery life sucks; the responsiveness made my iPhone 3GS running iOS 5 look good. I commonly tell those who ask that the Nexus 7 is one of the worst technology purchases I’ve made in the last ten years (the worst before that would have been the Compaq iPaq in 2001; it didn’t even run Linux very well, although that ran better than WinCE at the time). I use my iPhone in preference to the Nexus 7 for just about everything. I bought a Kobo mini for $50 because the Nexus 7 wasn’t even a good epub reader, and that’s having tried four or five different ebook readers on the Nexus 7.
This is anecdotal, but I am not sure whether I’ll ever buy another Android product—regardless of manufacturer—and I say that despite feeling the need to stay on top of available technology from a friend/family recommendation perspective. (That, and I do like gadgets, but I'm much less willing to put up with crap these days.)
I just got the Nexus 7 LTE (2013), and I can already feel the dust collecting on my retina iPad, and to a lesser degree, my iPhone 4.
For me, the extra responsiveness makes all the difference. It feels like any extra battery life I'm gaining with the iPad is spent waiting for it to do things.
This is my first Android device, in a home full of Apple products.
I don't have the original, it's the 2013. I've heard 4.3 fixes the lag issues with the original. Battery life lasts more than a day for me, and it only has noticeable responsiveness problems when I quickly scroll down web pages.
My Nexus is horribly laggy on a lot of things (and if I ever have more than one tab open in Chrome, the tablet is damned near unusable), even with 4.3; the battery life for me is measured in hours.
For me, it’s a little worse because the software is still so far behind in terms of availability and usability—there’s so very little that the Nexus does better than my iPhone 4 that I don’t want to use it.
The article claims the average selling price of non-iPad tablets (which must be 99% Android) increased by 17%, while the iPad mini pulled the iPad ASP down by the same amount, so your theory is at odds with the facts.
You have to know the real numbers to make that determination. Increased 17% from 100 is 117. iPad decreasing from 550 to 450 (pulled out of my ...) would mean the parent is still right.
the iPad mini it may be mini, but is still expensive, and from my own empirical experience, 9 out of 10 tablets I see in the user hands are cheap $59 devices.
> I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.
> There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.
I've seen a lot more than that here in Toronto as I'm on transit—but far more often I see either eInk readers (Kobo, Kindle, rarely Sony) or iPads (mini or full-size). In the last few weeks, I think I've actually seen more Playbooks than Android tablets, but that's unusual.
Minor point, but from a business perspective, this isn't helping hardware vendors. They are selling a nearly zero margin product. Apple's taking the profits, everyone else is fighting for the leftovers, the unprofitable part of the market.
This is to be expected from the flood of $100 Android tablets, but to be honest this isn't hurting Apple, this is hurting Microsoft.
Apple has their very profitable segment of the market, Android is taking the low end, and there just isn't much of a place for Windows tablets.
It may not be from a business perspective. But in terms of whether the market is working its wonders, I'd say it is perfect. Consumers benefit because there is a lot of fierce competition.
Exactly the way it should be for a hardware product like this.
It's definitely hurting Apple, their margins are dropping as well. They released the iPad Mini in response to the popularity of smaller tablets and they make less margins on that device. Their sales overall have declined as well: http://www.macworld.com/article/2045056/profits-dip-again-fo...
Wait, wait. So in a quarter where the newest iPad is 6 months old, there were less iPads sold than every Android tablet manufacturer in the world combined?
Apple is far from doomed. But those who were saying that Apple would dominate the tablet market forever were wrong. PS please don't answer "but look at the profits". They will come down too, as it's only right in a competitive market.
"The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market."
http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance
It was a popular meme among Apple fanboys a couple of years ago....
Stories like this are interesting me because while sales numbers show Android doing well, usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many people are actually using their Android tablets, at least not in the numbers people are using iPads.
And then you read the last paragraph and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.
>And while Android appears to be making headway against Apple and the iPad, the truth is that Apple remains the top selling tablet brand by a huge margin. While Apple sold the aforementioned 14.5 million tablets from April through June, Samsung was the closest competitor to the Cupertino based manufacturer with 8.1 million tablets sold. in the period.
Thunderstorms like this are interesting to me because while surveys of the first two floors show the water rising, an inspection of the attic seems to indicate that not much water has actually come up here yet, at least not more than an inch or two.
And then you realize this flooding comes from several different storm systems and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.
But I seem to remember not too long ago that "iPad was the iPod of tablets" or something, and therefore will always have 80+ percent market share. I guess that didn't turn out true.