Sales of obscure game consoles vs. non-iPad tablets
marco.org
marco.org
This incident convinced me that non-iPad tablets have a fighting chance. I'd like to see this exercise done again in one year. I believe non-iPads will gain more traction.
Another source, reported by BGR, has Android at 20% of tablet market share.[1]
[1]http://www.bgr.com/2011/08/12/android-steals-20-of-tablet-ma...
Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for non-Apple tablets. But in reality, there don't seem to be that many in the wld yet.
I think it's sad what Marco's rooting interest are here. It's not enough that the iPad succeed. It's competitors have to fail for him to be happy.
If the tablet really is the future of personal computing then there will be more than 1 successful platform. If not, then maybe not. Right now Best Buy is betting their business on the former. If you walk into a Best Buy they have a section for tablets equal to their section of laptops (and larger than their 1 row of desktops). Maybe Best Buy is wrong and they'll go back to a big area of laptops again. Or maybe Marco, Gruber, etc. will find a new data point that they can point to as being all-important.
Marco and Gruber would be fine with the two successful platforms being iOS and WP7. They honestly believe that the mandatory walled garden model with heavily limited options is better for most customers, and that "open" platforms such as Android (and Mac OS X) are fundamentally incapable of providing the same level of user experience. I disagree completely, but their position is more nuanced than just Apple fanboyism.
And do those numbers account for customer returns as well, since there do seem to be a certain amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Android tablet returns are abnormally high.
Furthermore, there also seems to be a large quantity of super-cheap, and super-terrible Android based tablets [1]. Are those counted in the same numbers as better ones like the Xoom and Samsung Tabs?
I'm not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious if people are actually BUYING Android tablets (and keeping them).
[1] http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2011/06/05/archos-unveiled... Crap screen, crap battery, barely any memory, < 3.0 OS.
But in general there's no way for OEMs to know exactly how many Android tablets are in consumer hands.
That's how Google knows about every Android phone.
But let's go with his Honeycomb filter anyway; the latest update from Google (August 1) shows Android 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 enjoying market shares of 0.4%, 0.7%, and 0.2% respectively, for a total of 1.3%. A 44% increase in Honeycomb tablet shipments in the space of 2 weeks seems somewhat unlikely, but a portion of that may result from 'back to school' sales; that's part of why I bought mine.
The market is going to look very different in a year. I consider myself and Android/Google fanboy, but when Motorola launched their Xoom last winter I rolled my eyes at the absurdly high price along with everyone else. It seems to me that the Honeycomb platform didn't get started properly until April, when Acer and Asus lunched products that competed with the Ipad around the $500 price point. Since then Samsung and Lenovo have released their own Honeycomb devices, and Asus claims to be selling 400k/mo. of its Eee tablet. Amazon's two forthcoming tablets are likely to sell well too, if the success of the Kindle is any guide. I see a 4:1 use ratio between iPad and equivalent Android tablets this time next year, maybe even 3:1 if Android products cluster around the $400 price point. It took Android on smartphones a few years to achieve market parity with Apple's offering.
As well as being good for consumers, this is good news for developers too. From never buying any apps for my Android phone, I'm about to drop $20 today (VPN/remote desktop, pro PDF tool, sketchbook). Although I only got the tablet last Monday (an Eee btw), it's already drastically altering my use patterns, and I feel safe in finally calling the death of the conventional PC. I find the device infinitely more satisfying and productive to use than any laptop I have ever owned, and can plug in a keyboard dock if I need to do a lot of typing.
RIM and HP are the big losers here; I can't see any reason to buy into the Blackberry OS or WebOS from either a consumer or business point of view.
Especially in a gaming context, my working definition of a tablet is:
1. Does it have a touchscreen?
2. Is it bigger than a smartphone?
3. Can it play Angry Birds? (a)
The Nook Color and most other non-Honeycomb Android tablets easily qualify on all 3 points.
(a) out-of-the-box with no rooting/hacking/etc
150 million units!
http://www.ryanwatkins.net/images/tablet-gameconsole-sales.p...
Knowing this it does not seem fair to me to compare their total sales figures.
* The Jaguar was a 5th gen console, the generation leader was the PlayStation with ~100 million units sold. The Jaguar sold under 250000, or 0.25% of the leader, other major entrants of the generation were the N64 (33m) and the Saturn (10m)
* The CD-i was something of a hybrid console/media player (only time I saw it used was a driving school, fwiw), it's nominally part of the 4th generation whose leader was the Super Famicom/Super NES. The CD-i sold ~500k units, the SNES sold 50 million. 1%. The the other major entrant of the generation was the Mega Drive/Genesis with 40m.
* The 3DO Interactive was a 5th gen console, sold 2 million, 2% of leader (PS)
* The TurboGraphx16, I think calling it a failure is a bit of a stretch: it was a 4th gen console and sold 10m units (~20% of generation leader) while it was pretty much only available in japan, where it performed quite well indeed. Comparatively the Saturn bombed much harder (and the Dreamcast did even worse, compared to its generation leader)
eg: ~100m iPhones (most recent data I could find was through Q4 2010 for aggregate):
Then compare to the top gaming platforms ever shipped:
PlayStation 154.59 million
Nintendo DS 147.86 million
Game Boy/Game Boy Color 118.69 million
Sony PlayStation 102.49 million
By that measuring stick iOS wins big vs. obscure consoles, but it also wins vs. the biggest and best.
ref - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter.s...
ref - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...
If we're talking about pure numbers here, there are more substantive comparisons to be made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_pho...
Also AFAIK the four generations of iPhones can all run the same software, which in a way makes it equivalent to a single console lifecycle, since consoles are never forwards compatible.
Aren't phones effectively on a 2-3 year subsidized schedule anyways? I know a minority of people do buy unsubsidized phones at full price, but that minority is tiny.
(Finally, remember we're talking iPads here, not iPhones. Two very different markets.)
A valid point, and I think when you're talking about today's hand-held gaming devices vs today's mobile phones, you've got a meaningful comparison because the consumer can reasonably substitute a phone for a PSP or similar, but I'm not sure what is meaningful about comparing the lifetime of Apple's work in the mobile sector to one or two iterations of various gaming consoles across various timeframes.
Also AFAIK the four generations of iPhones can all run the same software
Not true in many cases. Consider that the first two iPhone models can't even run fully featured firmware because of hardware limitations.
Comparing portables to standalone consoles is problematic anyway, for various reasons. Not least, more than one person can play on a standalone at once...
Most of my friends, with iPhones, have upgraded with each iteration of the iPhone. They would each be counted three times, were we to consider each iPhone iteration a separate platform. However, if we're being honest about the experience being compatible across the iterations, is the triple dipping really fair? Frankly, most of the same friends upgraded because they could (afford to) and need shiny objects and that phone-dropped blemish gone -- "The Apple Way."
I think you were going there, but I had to spell it out.
I can see how they're not as different as PS 1/2/3 but they're definitely not the same device. Steve Jobs would slap anyone who dared say that iPhone1 and iPhone4 were "hardware upgrades with same software and software ecosystem"
Different generations of consoles are completely different hardware architectures completely incompatible.
http://martin.drashkov.com/2011/03/why-android-tablets-will-...
This is both new and exciting.
The tablet market is new and still mostly luxury. I wouldn't place any bets right now, even considering Apple's head start.
Gaming consoles appeal to a limited section of the market and will generally ship less units than a mobile device. For instance, in a family of four, you might find four cellphones and only one gaming system. Simple fact. I think a more interesting comparison would be between tablet sales and mobile gaming device sales.
Wait 'till 10 inch clone tablets hit $100 for xmas.
(ironically hitting the OLPC pricepoint goal)
Too bad, seems to me like this graph is meaningless otherwise. The comparison is completely arbitrary.
"Here's a bunch of console you probably never heard about. They flopped. They completely failed.
Well these non-ipad tablets have done even worse so far. Enjoy the taste of unadulterated failure."
That's exactly my point. "Here's a bunch of [insert failed consumer electronic] you've never heard of without regard for disparate product life cycles or market environments". The data points are interchangeable so long as they follow the guideline of "consumer electronic that existed at some point in time and didn't sell well"
No, you said adding the iPad sales to the graph would make it meaningful. What meaning would it mean to the graph? It might change the meaning of the graph to "the iPad sells well, other tablets don't" but then the consoles included are meaningless.
The point of the graph is "these tablets don't sell for shit, here, compare to sales of stuff which didn't sell for shit either".
The point of the graph is "these tablets don't sell for shit, here, compare to sales of stuff which didn't sell for shit either"
Yes, a point that remains lost on me considering you could stack this year's tablets up against a myriad of 20 year old devices and make an equally meaningless comparison.
I wouldn't go that far, but I think in this case, the markets are so radically different that it's difficult to take a lot of meaning from the comparisons.
So far, the non-IOS tablets are selling better than the arguably obscure Atari 2600 did in it's first two years, but if we match the numbers today, the Atari 2600 has sold more units than both iPad models combined. Perhaps Atari is simply an outlier, but throw it up on the graph and it would substantially change the impression that people take away from the image, as well as highlight the absurdity I see in the comparison.
Who knows, a few generations more it could have become small and portable. At the time, it looked like the future.