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Comment by marze | Hacker News Reader

Lucky for Apple's competitors they have Android, otherwise they'd really be up a creek.

With the hardware volume purchasing advantage combined with the many-year head start they have on the OS, it will be surprising to me if any competitor obtains a 10% market share in the iPad or iPod Touch markets.

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At this point, you should probably remember that Android came out 2 years ago and managed to overtake the iPhone in that short time frame. I highly doubt Apple will have even a plularity (let alone a majority) of the tablet market in 2 years.

You're presuming that the Android vs iPhone sales figures are indicative of popularity vs the iPhone only being restricted to one network provider (at least in the USA). The iPad doesn't have that restriction.

It may very well happen that Android tablets overtake iPads but Android vs iPhones market is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Apples to robots?

> At this point, you should probably remember that Android came out 2 years ago and managed to overtake the iPhone in that short time frame. I highly doubt Apple will have even a plularity (let alone a majority) of the tablet market in 2 years.

More Android devices are sold than iPhones, yes. Add the iPod Touch to that and I'm pretty sure Apple still has a substantial lead (and possibly growing).

Also, how many of those Android devices are being sold with 1.6 and aren't able to upgrade the 2.x series due to manufacturer laziness or hardware limitations? Is it really fair to compare an Android 1.6 device sold today to an iOS device sold today? The iOS device will, based on history to date, be eligible for OS upgrades for at least two years. The Android 1.6 device is already two years out of date and not getting any younger.

Only 30% of iOS devices are iPod Touch. At android's growth rate, that'll maybe stave it off a quarter or two.

Last figures I saw (in a link posted here at HN) was double the iPhone sales in Q3 . As someone pointed out in response to the obvious reply, even if you add all the other iDevices, you still don't match that. So in sales they're already ahead.

It'll take a few quarters of higher sales to catch up with Apple's installed base, but since the entire market is growing, I don't think it'll take that long.

I'd argue that if the competitors didn't have Android, the tablets would just run on x86 processors. And run either windows or linux. I believe that the presence of ARM early in this market is actually good on the OS side, because it doesn't lead to shoehorning windows onto a tablet. x86 tablets aren't going to succeed both because of the pressure to run desktop OSes, but also because x86 processor companies only seem to be able to produce and market market clock speed and not what really matters in this case (low power consumption and heat output).

With the failure of Linux netbooks, I don't think it'd do any better on tablets, ARM or x86.

I never said it was going to do any better.

Which Linux? Android is already doing okay, Meego and WebOS are relatively untested but have big corps behind them and Ubuntu should fill a similar niche to the one where people run Windows tablets because they need some specific bit of Windows software.

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