Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffreymcmanus | Hacker News Reader

He's crazy to assume that the Kindle Fire isn't competitive with the iPad, or that the $199 price point isn't going to at least partially inform the pricing of the iPad 3.

The days of the $700 tablet are over.

View on HN

He's not crazy and that conclusion is not unique to gruber. The screen area of the iPad is nearly 2x that of the fire. Resolution is 1.3x but pixel density will increase on iPad3.

They are about as competitive as a 15" laptop is to a netbook: not very as they are physically quite different. The price difference reflects this.

Consumers are funny, though. They don't really care about stats; that kind of data is for geeks, who are not the target audience for this at all.

And don't forget Christensen's adage that the truly disruptive technology is typically a little bit worse and a whole lot cheaper than the incumbent technology.

One way or another, there are some big advantages to a smaller screen.

Consumes don’t care about stuff they can’t (easily) see. Pixel density, probably. 10" and 7" tablets are, however, sufficiently different.

No one buys tablets by the square yard, though. Lots of people seem to say that a 10" tablet is inherently better than a 7" tablet, but I think the market is still far too young to really know the winning form factor.

Actually, people do in fact choose tablets and laptops based on size. I'm not suggesting that either size is superior. They are clearly different.

Anecdotally, I find that the iPad size is great for a table/lap, but less great for holding, while I love the size/shape/weight of the Kindle2 for reading. I don't think any particular size will win out.

Let me quote something that was said about the iPod on its launch:

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Despite 10 years of evidence to the contrary people keep telling themselves that Apple is going to change their device pricing due to pressure from the rest of the market. Good luck this time.

Only ten years of evidence? I still remember the Performa lines costing twice as much as a comparable PC. I wouldn't go so far as to call Apple products Veblen goods, but they're pretty close, and I don't see iPad's $500 pricing harming it in any way.

Just using '10 years' as weak shorthand for the last time I could remember anyone was right about Apple cutting prices. Certainly they did in the clone era (-1997) and you can argue the original iMac as well (thru 2002 when the sunflower debuted).

Remember when people said the iPod was doomed because of cheaper competition? That didn't work out so hot, I hear.

And yet apple still released the shuffle... Weird huh?

Did they release it because they were losing money to competitors, or because they were leaving money on the table with their existing price points? I suspect the latter.

They were losing out on customers so they released an el-cheapo piece of crap. This is my point.

Losing out on customers to who? Or just missing out on selling to customers who wanted a cheaper option? Those are two very different things.

I don't think they release the shuffle because their higher-priced products were suffering in comparison to budget competitors. They released the shuffle because there was demand at the $100 price point that they could profitably address without undercutting their more expensive products.

Famous Steve story I saw last month when he retired about how people at Apple wanted to attack all the mp3 markets from the start but he forced them to focus focus focus on the one big model to get it perfect. Two years later they opened it up, something I take it we'll see with the low end phone and eventually with ipads too.

I think Apple's pricing in relationship to other brands is changing. They have historically been seen as a premium brand and were priced accordingly. These days though, they tend to be much more on price-parity or even winning on price. Take a look at how the iMac compares to other premium all-in-one machines? Fairly close. Then the iPad - when the Android competitors were coming out we kept saying how they'd have to be so much cheaper to compete and they weren't. Finally, the Air's $1000 price point is half of what Intel was positioning the Ultrabooks which has caused the other manufacturers to scramble cut their prices.

I think they're still the consumer electronics premium brand par excellence, but they've dominated their supply chains so thoroughly that they've found savings other companies just can't compete with.

You can still buy a laptop for a lot less than $999, though, and that's where other people will come out of the woodwork to show you loud, clumsy looking Acer and HP machines.

You can still buy a laptop for a lot less than $999, though, and that's where other people will come out of the woodwork to show you loud, clumsy looking Acer and HP machines.

Yup, that's why I specifically mentioned the Air vs. Ultrabooks, a $399 Acer isn't in the same class.

I agree, and I think that we're going to see a lot more of that now that Tim Cook, 'Mr Supply Chain', is in charge.

As soon as we see people getting work done on the Kindle Fire, I'll grant you that.

If your work involves a lot of writing, then the iPad isn't an obvious boon [1]. But if you can do your work more efficiently by treating data and actions as symbols, the iPad is just overflowing with potential, much of it already being realized. Musicians, artists, animators, logicians, teachers, doctors, researchers; the list of professions offered new ways to work is getting longer and longer. To these people, the iPad can be life-changing.

I don't think the Kindle Fire will change anything. It's just not in Amazon's DNA to make a product focused on anything other than buying and consuming content — and there's never been a shortage of ways to buy things.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-e...

Logicians? I'm not seeing the iPad app to write math papers without, y'know, writing.

Logic is a game of symbols and relationships. The iPad is the best tool I've ever seen for working with symbols and relationships.

Being a practicing mathematician means generating and publishing results. I am interested to see your iPad app for diagonalization results or computability proofs.

Have you ever seen a whiteboard? I do anything remotely logic based on one.

My whiteboard even has a fantastic multi-user interaction system!

The Kindle is not for getting work done. It is for consuming content.

That’s the point.

The potentially interesting question is whether the iPad is actually good for non-consumption tasks. All the faculty in my research group purchase Apple products, and most of them are wandering about with iPads. They're all quite happy to use them for reading papers, reading email, etc. However, none of them, despite having been using the devices for some time (close to year for some) even feel comfortable using them for technical email, let alone writing lectures, presentations, or papers.

Again, I don't know whether the software to make those tasks workable _could_ exist; I simply have experiential evidence that it does not yet.

   Musicians, artists, animators, ???

Any serious professional will have a maxed out task specific equipment.

    logicians??

Lol I take it that you are not being serious!

teachers, doctors, researchers!

haha Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard. As far as researchers are concerned any serious researcher will be either using legacy software or cutting edge software that runs on specialized machine. And oh if you actually leave your hipster utopia you will realize that teachers get paid peanuts.

please iPad is a toy and kindle fire is a cheaper and much more affordable toy.

>Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard.

Any reference for that?

I would also be mildly skeptical about that claim; I think there have been some fairly successful uses of custom UIs in medicine.

Well, an anti-reference: The (admittedly few) doctors I know enter simple keywords into some predetermined fields - perfect for an iPad. For anything longer they record a message that someone else transcribes.

I have made a living as a musician, as a 3d animator, and as a software dev. My parents are both teachers. I did a lot of research in my University days.

In all of these areas, I can see the potential for multitouch-based applications that go far, far beyond what we're currently seeing, or have ever seen on a traditional mouse/keyboard computer. In fact, in my current line of work as a developer, I'm pursuing these very things.

If you're in a line of work where you're attempting to push the boundaries of what's possible with a computer, I find it hard to believe that you aren't fully aware of the realized and unrealized potential of multitouch devices.

Just because the iPad feels like a toy right now, doesn't mean it's limited to that sort of usage for all people, from now on. I just don't see Amazon playing any role in pushing user-facing technology forward. Silk is brilliant, but the Fire doesn't really enable anything that wasn't previously possible, and I don't see that changing. The iPad did.

I'm pretty sure by "feels like" you mean "is".

Maybe multitouch will make all kinds of exciting differences. Maybe it won't. As long as you agree that you can't point to any of these exciting results yet, we're on the same page.

One example: http://www.blogher.com/ipad-nearmiracle-my-son-autism

..and all the stories about grandparents getting iPads. These are all anectodes of course, and we'll have to wait for the peer-reviewed papers to come in some years from now.

You can call the iPad a toy all you want. I'm sure some Delta and United pilots will disagree (hopefully they don't allow games on the iPads they have).

Lots of people called the first Mac a toy with its silly mouse and GUI when it was released, yet here we are.

The problem with touch interfaces is that they're low-resolution. Most "professional" software allows manipulation of a large number of parameters. With a keyboard and mouse you can do this fairly efficiently but you just can't pack that many widgets onto a touch screen unless you make it much larger than 10". Compound gestures may be more expressive than mouse clicks but they're also more error-prone and much less discoverable.

  > much less discoverable

That's not necessarily an issue if we're essentially talking about power users. If the app is worth its salt, then professionals that can make use of it will learn the ropes (so long as there is sufficient material -- help docs, tutorials, screencasts, etc). A good example is to look at text editors like Vim or Emacs. Much of their functionality isn't very 'discoverable,' but the power locked inside drives people to learn. Especially if you plan on diving into a particular profession. You want to use tools that make your job easier, even if there is a steep initial investment of time to learn the system.

> haha Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard

You are just making that up, right?

Health care is the one area where tablets did very well even before the iPad, and iPads have proven to be popular among doctors.

To me the e-ink Kindle is life-changing ... it's what I wanted since 10 years ago, an affordable e-ink reader and access to the biggest library of books on earth, just one click away.

You mention researchers and logicians using the iPad. Can you give any examples?

I tried using the iPad, but the lack of support for LaTeX or papers in svn, git or mercurial repositories made it completely unusable for anything resembling work.

In my field (Information Systems), most papers are served as PDFs. My advisor has switched almost entirely to his iPad for most work, especially when reading/annotating articles.

Most journals in my field require Word docs, and don't use LaTeX. It's been my observation that the field is filled with business people who use computers, and relatively fewer computer people who ended up in business. Sure, there are some of each, but the former seem to outnumber the latter.

It seems useful to mathematicians: they spend most of their time reading, thinking and writing. An iPad can help with the reading, which is one activity out of the three!

I agree. I also think that the damage is going to be more for current-android-tablet makers, such as Samsung, Acer, Asus, Viewsonic ..etc. More so to the ones who price their tablets above $400. Everyone's going to compare them to the Fire and say, "Why even consider anything when I can get this for half the price?".

Pretty safe to say, Amazon's tablet is going to beat all the other android-tablets.

It's hard to know what to do with that information in a world in which the current android tablet makers can barely give their devices away.

That makes no sense. I think $199 is a great deal for a 7" tablet, and they will sell like hotcakes. But anyone selling a $400+ tablet is offering a 10.1" screen. This is a completely different user experience, and very likely a different market. Persoanlly, I don't even understand the attraction of a 7" tablet. I'm quite OK with paying 2x the price for something that's about the same size as a sheet of paper or a textbook, however.

I agree, the HP Touchpad firesale, and the Kindle will have serious long term impact on the public's perception of what a tablet (any tablet) should cost.

According to some surveys[1], most people view the $500 price for a tablet as premium anyway, and it's about the maximum price they would pay, which might mean even though Apple sells most tablets right now, they're probably selling them only to that niche market that think a tablet is worth $500.

The $200 pricing range hasn't been explored properly yet, and I think when it will be, a lot more people will become interested in tablets. We'll probably see an avalanche of "good enough" $200 tablets next year.

[1] - http://gigaom.com/mobile/heres-how-much-consumers-will-pay-f...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com