Why is anyone happy that it is only an iPad market? Do they expect Apple to continually innovate in a non-competitive market? If you like tablets and not just Apple, you want to see more contenders in the market not less.
Probably, yes, and I would argue there is some reason to believe they would do so. Look at what happened in the MP3 player market: Apple utterly dominated that market long ago, and yet they kept messing with the product lines, adding models, changing the feature balances, etc. There was and still is a lot of experimentation going on there and there's essentially no real competitors in that market anymore. "Portable music player" and "iPod" are practically synonyms.
Apple (with Steve Jobs at the helm, anyway) is different from many companies. They don't see themselves as competing with other companies. Instead I believe they consider Apple of the previous year to be the competitor to beat for the current year.
Was that true outside the 'States? I don't remember the iPod ever dominating here, while in the tablet market the iPad does seem to dominate.
Portugal. There were iPods, but as far as I'm aware they didn't dominate the market - in fact, I believe Creative players were more popular.
I would also like to know where you are from. iPod was an incredibly strong brand here. It was basically synonymous with mp3 players. Anything else seemed, and in truth was, second best. I owned 3 or 4 of the things.
I think Apple has been largely US-centric up until the iPhone, so that could explain why there's a disconnect online when topics like this come up since obviously non-US people will have had a different Apple experience over the last decade or so than those of us here who have been seeing iPods everywhere for years.
How about: - increased codec support formats like flac? - wireless sycning? - syncing or streaming for unlimited music services like Spotify, Rdio, or Rhapsody? - industry standard like micro-usb for charging and syncing? - micro sd storage expansion?
I don't know how people see an innovative market for mp3 players.
I know at least six people bought the iPod Nano because of that and they will probably never considers buying one if Apple were adding MicroSD or supporting FLAC. (Can't comment about Spotify, Rdio or Rhapsody because they're not available in my country anyway.)