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In 2008, when the Eee PC was revolutionizing the computing world and driving every manufacturer to make cheaper and smaller laptops, Sony washed its hands of the whole thing. The "race to the bottom," the company said, would profoundly impact the industry, killing profit margins and flooding the market with cheap, terrible machines. Sony was wrong, its stance lasting about a year before joining the competition with its own VAIO W.

I actually disagree with this first paragraph, I think Sony was right. The "race to the bottom" definitely did impact the industry, and for quite some time, no manufacturer even offered a laptop with decent build quality, except for Apple of course. People thought "why should I pay $1,000+ for this laptop when I can get a much cheaper laptop that will do everything I need?" And then the Macbook Air and the iPad come along and all of a sudden, people have no problem paying more for a quality product. If it wasn't for Apple, the OEMs would continue to release shitty machines until they all went bankrupt from negative profit margins.

I don't think the tablet market is experiencing the same race to the bottom because people are not buying these shitty tablets (which the Nexus 7 isn't). Everybody is still buying iPads and will continue to do so until a tablet that can actually compete with the iPad is released. (I have only seen two that even come close, the Galaxy and the Transformer, and still...) I think Apple has proven that consumers are willing to pay more if the product is good. And this is all coming from someone that does not own a single Apple product.

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