humm..it's a bit like saying that your chance of building a successful search engine, without Google first doing something incredibly stupid, are pretty slim.
There's a billion precedents. GM, 3dfx, pre-tick-tock Intel, George Lucas.
There's a billion precedents. GM, 3dfx, pre-tick-tock Intel, George Lucas.
Like Google, the iPad is currently the low-end and the high-end of the market, but unlike Google, it's vulnerable on the low-end. That's where Amazon will attack it and with ~100 million customers, their credit card numbers ready to go, good brand-loyalty, a huge content store, and so much experience in on-line/cloud services that even Apple uses them, they'll likely have quite a bit of success.
I don't know the latest figures, but iPhones relatively small market share accounted for over 50% of profits last time I saw. Amazon might sell a lot of cheap tablets, but that won't hurt Apple's profits.
If you do that then it's something like 4% of unit sales share giving 50% of profit. If you exclude people selling millions of throwaway cellphones for pennies and only include HTC, RIM and the smartphone parts of Nokia, Samsung etc. then the profit they make (while still better than the industry average, thanks to RIM and Nokia pulling it down) is much more closely tied to market share and therefore seems much more under threat as Android advances on that front.