It is amazing to me that of everyone who has made tablets, only Apple seems to be successful at it. Maybe it is just like someone said recently: there is no tablet market; just an iPad market.
The brilliance of what Apple has done with their mobile products is hard to overstate. They put all this effort into designing mobile chips and a mobile OS for the iPhone and iPod Touch. They took the fruits of those efforts and stuck them into a tablet format, and bam, you've got an iPad. They took them and stuck them into a set-top box, and bam, you've got the Apple TV 2G.
They get to spread the development costs of their silicon and OS over these four product lines. Talk about efficient reuse of your development investment. I own three separate devices powered by an A4 CPU and iOS operating system.
Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves.
Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
Android is now 20% of the tablet market, while the BB Playbook is nowhere and the HP TouchPad can't even stay alive for two months.
Edit: Someone posted the link below.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
Meh, ARM is a space where a number of companies are already in cutthroat competition and no one is going to walk in and totally change the game.
Apple's MO here is pretty clear:
(1) investigate their options thoroughly,
(2) back the best price/performance,
(3) possibly make some optimizations,
(4) then lock up the supply if possible.
...
And the results actually are pretty impressive, iPad 2 leaves every other tablet in the dust:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4605/40363.png
While getting the best battery life in the category:
44 fps / 1.30 = 33.8 fps, still ahead by anywhere from 45% to 200%.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsVie...
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
You realize this doesn't make sense...right?
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity. They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient. Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices. They also sell them to Apple. Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4. Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
So what am I missing?
It's customizing the design, not creating a custom design.
* best walk-in store in SF, btw
http://www.abiresearch.com/press/3753-Android+Takes+20%25+Me...
Android-based Phones were slower to get that much market-share, and we all know how that turned out. It's really just a matter of time.
Is it though? Shipments don't equal sales.
It's incredible that anyone can make that claim when it's patently obvious from simple observation that there are hardly any Android tablets in the wild. If they're going to pull numbers out of their ass to create the perception that Android is succeeding on tablets, they should at least make up numbers that are marginally plausible.
Seriously, I doubt it's 5%
...they should at least make up numbers that are marginally ...
If your going to mock someone for "making up" numbers try not to make up numbers of your own in the same post. The op provided data, you did not. Unless you were going for irony; in that case, well never mind.
Despite this, I still routinely see android tablets in airports. I saw a galaxy tab 7" tonight (along with 3 people using ipads in first class). I've also seen a few galaxy tab 10.1s and a couple of HTC Flyers.
To be clear, I also wonder if the actual ratio is 4 to one. I just don't think the number is completely outside the realm of possibility.
edit: Care to explain the down votes? It's too early to make such proclamations. It took a while for the cellphone market to catch up with Apple, why should we expect the tablet market to be any different?
In the best case scenario the iPad could play out more like the iPod: year after year there were prominent iPod-killers like the Zune and cheap knockoffs and year after year Apple dominated the market.
It's also important to note there's really only one successful competitor to the iPhone -- Android. WebOS is dead, RIM is on the ropes, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc didn't catch up as much as they let Google catch-up and they rode their success. (my point being we can't under estimate the difficulty in trying to compete toe-to-toe with iOS as only one company has done it successfully to date)
HP never exerted any effort into its tablet. It released a faulty device just to catch up with the rest of the vendors releasing devices.
I believe that the next wave of Android tablets will be awesome, so the next generation from Motorola and Samsung. HP doesn't seem interested.
1. http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/tablets/22...
My point was that saying the one true tablet is the iPad is false but HP is the wrong player to consider.
We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches(April, say the rumors).
Sorry, but I just find this statement hard to agree with. Microsoft is forever shipping some "game changer" "pretty soon now", but they haven't managed to change any games in a very long time now.
If Microsoft, or anyone else, has some revolutionary thing, it will be interesting to see it when it happens. But I am certainly not anticipating any such event in the next year.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita...
It still makes the iPad look half baked.
but as is the way with MS they killed it and settled for mediocre.
I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative.
This might actually be a pretty good summary of MSFT's corporate culture.
The impression I always get from the inside is that it's a company dominated by middle managers. They've got so many PMs in so many layers that you'd wonder if it's just PMs all the way down.
The combination of mature, gigantic company, lack of strong leadership, and extremely generous benefits has combined to create a population of people who are there for the stability and extremely afraid of rocking the boat or killing the golden goose.
Making futuristic looking concept movies is pretty easy compared to actually making and shipping a physical product.
Anyway, thanks for the maximum 4 downvotes HN.
That said, I would not recommend it to people. The iPad actually can, and does, do the job of a tablet pc far better than any tablet pc I've used.