Kindle Fire HD 8.9 vs. iPad 3: Is the Apple Experience really worth $200?
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
That's an amazing thing, if you ask me. Hi-dpi screens are a benchmark feature that made me a heavy mobile device user. Web browsing on a phone was not very appealing, and then comes the "Retina" display on the iPhone 4, and bam, I'm an Apple customer.
I got an iPad 1 as a gift, and I ended up using it for reading a lot more than I expected, which just had me itching for the day a "Retina" display landed in an iPad. Got the iPad 3 recently and love it to bits, much more for that screen quality than anything in the iOS ecosystem.
Hi-dpi is what finally killed print media fully for me. I have no use for print books or magazines. I have an old-ish Kindle e-ink reader and the iPad 3, and the two of them combined weigh less than a single hearty book in my book bag. I look forward to the day when people unwilling or unable to pay the Apple premium for devices can enjoy the same screen quality. Ubiquitous hi-dpi tablets is the coolest next high watermark in consumer computing IMO.
Here are some things to consider:
1. One of the form factors touted around for the iPad mini is the 8.9 inch form factor. No one expects the iPad mini to be the same price as the iPad 3. So that $200 difference may be a temporary advantage.
2. The iPad/iPhone app store has been around since 2008. Folks who have purchased an iPhone and an iPad may have sunk substantial money into buying apps. That "sunk cost" is just another hurdle any other tablet maker is going to have to beat.
3. People talk about how Amazon and Google are "giving away the razor and selling razor blades" and Apple is in the hardware business. That's quite simply BS. Apple gets 30% of the gross from the App store, including in-app purchases. Those 99 cent Angry Birds downloads add up. The app store may not have been a big profit center in 2009, but we're not in 2009 anymore.
4. Frankly, I'm excited that Google and Amazon are bringing competition to the iPad-dominated tablet market. Competition means better prices and better services. However, I'm not calling a winner to this round until we see what Apple has up its sleeve.
Apple has paid developers a total over $4bn as of June this year. That's nothing for them compared to what they make on hardware.
As a percentage of revenue, Apple makes less from the iTunes Store today than they did six years ago. They operate it close to break-even as a means of selling more hardware.
http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/63878-image/Appl...
Running the store means:
- Employing god knows how many app reviewers
- Employing dev relations, marketing, design and other support roles
- Paying for credit card transaction fees
- Maintaining server infrastructure at extraordinary scale with ridiculous uptime requirements
None of this is cheap. And none of the resulting revenue, in the hundreds of millions, comes anywhere close to the juice of hardware revenue, in the tens of billions.
* http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-03/here-comes-nexus-7-... * http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230414120457750...
Apple is rumored to be revealing a smaller iPad tablet during an event this October. Most people are calling it the iPad mini. I'm calling it the reason I haven't bought a Google Nexus 7.
In this case, Amazon is taking a risk by selling the Kindle Fire HD at or close to cost, and hoping to make it up in advertising revenue. This is the Google model in action.
Personally, my privacy is worth a little more than $200 to me, so no thanks. Not to mention that the iPad 3 still has a larger screen and several hundred thousand more apps, which is really difficult to put a price on.
Remember, the principle is to be the best tablet at any price -- so you will be able to protect your "privacy" for less than $200.
I put "privacy" in quotes because the ads don't actually track you or your usage. Doing so is the wrong thing and would jeopardize people using the tablets. The ads simply show up on the lockscreen and we record impressions. It's a pretty interesting ad product, and Amazon has put a lot of steps in place to protect customers.
Looks like they can be opted out of.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/07/amazon-confirms-yes-you-c...
In other words until the feature is announced you can NOT disable the ads.
The advertisement you see doesn't mean anything- the risk comes through complete usage gathered by the advertising networks who bought the ad, and then resold to partners and affiliates.
The risk some of us worry about is that a data tsunami will eventually push total awareness of device users to a hostile government or facet of organized crime.
And while you would have worse things to worry about if the NSA or Google are compromised, there are millions of advertising affiliates and companies that share information and go bankrupt, which makes this concern a plausible fear in my mind
Amazon values its customers deeply and letting the third-party networks gather intel about its customers is a lose-lose proposition. Amazon loses its competitive advantage for having great data to make great recommendations, and customers lose their privacy. The ads don't work that way.
Let's also not pretend price and ads are the only difference:
iPad "3": better screen, bigger screen, better SoC, better apps, better battery life, actually on sale at the moment.
And unlike the Nexus or the iPad, Amazon's devices (well, at least the Kindle Fire) now comes with ads on the home screen and lock screen by default:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/all-kindle-fires-sold-to-us-customers-will-have-home-screen-ads/
Really, when we boil it all down, the main thing the iPad has going for it is the Apple Experience — and is that worth $200?
For existing tablet owners (most of which are iPad owners), it’s hard to say; they’ve already bought into the app ecosystem, filled up their iCloud, and sipped the Jobsian Kool-Aid.
I have no horse in this tablet race (waiting for an iPad mini announcement to choose a 7-8" tablet, and switching from an iPhone to a Nexus phone), but we know nothing about the Fire HD 8.9. The comparison table in this article says "Unknown" for battery life and the screen comparison includes the words "early reports suggest." Whoa, giving Consumer Reports a run for their money!!
I won't compare the app stores (Android is rapidly catching up, with release for Instagram, Instapaper, and more and more games, while iOS still wins on volume), but this is a crazy comparison. Comparing a tablet that hasn't released yet to one that is 7 months old? Aren't there better things to write about?
They talk about the Fire being thinner, as if a 0.6mm difference in thickness is going to make one tablet easier to hold.
I also doubt many users care much about a 2.5 ounce weight difference.
Price matters a lot to potential buyers. After that, it's just a question of whether using the tablet feels pleasant or frustrating.
The dimensions fetish seems to cut across reviews of all sorts of consumer electronics.
I mean, yes, it seems like splitting hairs -- but at some point, a device goes from being 'heavy' to 'light'. Same with thickness -- at some point a device stops feeling 'chunky' and becomes 'lithe'. I just don't know where those thresholds are :) (but I'm sure that industrial designers put a lot of thought into it).
But it's hard to believe there's going to be a major change in user experience with a half millimeter decrease in thickness.
At some point, a threshold is crossed where a device becomes uncomfortable to hold and interface with. This threshold is different for every situation, but there is a sweet spot where most people think it's easy to interface with (which is why desktop mice are only so small and so big). Many folks think an iPad is fine for reading books, while others require a Kindle, and yet others eschew anything but paperback books.
Weight, dimensions and feel are part of the usability. If you think UX is a fetish, you're ignoring how Apple got to be the biggest market cap company in the world.
Look at the problems discussed at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/kindle-fire-usability.html
They mention dimensions in the context of how it feels to use the product... rather than the more common review which places dimensions ahead of the experience.
The larger issue is though, if Apple is first to market, then they charge typical Apple premium prices. So it doesn't make any difference whether you're buying an Ipad2, 3, or whatever. Just be patient and wait for some other pad to come out which is generally just as functional, but will usually always be cheaper.
Microsoft is going to feel this as well, as manufacturers won't be very happy selling $200-$300 tablets with $100 ($200 for enterprise versions) Windows licenses. The tablet market is going to be commoditezed so much faster than the PC market. Hopefully, Amazon launches a smartphone with a similar strategy as well.
Intel will invariably be hurt by this, too, as people move to much cheaper, yet capable devices. Even if they succeed entering the tablet market with their Atom chips, they'll be be forced to have very competitive prices with ARM chips. So instead of selling $200 chips for ultrabooks and PC's, they'll be selling $20 chips. There's no way they can make it up in volume to keep or increase their current revenues and profits.
And your view of history is skewed; IBM released the PC (5150) in 1981. Compaq shipped the first compatible in 1982, and by 1985 the PC market was thoroughly commoditized.
Jump to the iPad's release in 2010. It's been 2 1/2 years, and still no signs of the tablet market being commoditized. It's still an iPad market, and not a tablet market.
Innovation isn't a magic word you can just wave around like a mantra, it has to concretize into something real if it's going to have any effect. There is, quite literally, not much room left for tablet innovation.
And your argument about "what's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware" is also pretty shortsighted. I'm sure that you had the foresight to predict the iPad?
Change and innovation aren't magic. But saying that there's no more room for innovation has been proven wrong, time and time again.
"Trailing in innovation" to grab market share is probably a very good move at this point.
I know it's chic to talk a lot about innovation, but take a serious look around yourself and what you'll find surrounding you on all sides are markets of incremental improvements, not "innovation"-driven markets. I think the tablet market is here now, or very nearly.
And grabbing market share with no foreseeable plan for decent profits seems hard to sell, but Wall St. seems to love Amazon.
Maybe they just want to be like a grocery chain that ekes out a 1-3% margin. But if that's the case, Wall St. won't be happy. Wall St. expects outsized profits based on their P/E ratio.
Even a technology considered relatively mature (cars) changes a lot, in subtle yet important details.
Just because you can't foresee change in existing markets doesn't mean it won't occur.
only in the last ~5 years with the arrival of netbooks did we start seeing PCs get really, really cheap.
Having the market structured such that innovation is rewarded might not be important in toothpaste, but it's really important in technology. Commoditization can kill innovation in a technology market, which is exactly what happened with PCs once Windows reached monopoly market share.
I suppose there are corner cases where they could be, but they're two rather different things.
Ketchup bottles: store upside down, wide mouth
Toothpaste: flat tops you can store vertically
Toothbrushes: grips, padding, strips, etc.
Even slicing bread is a huge innovation [how annoying is it to make a sandwich otherwise?].
That's the problem with not innovating: you don't know what you're giving up.
(1) Amazon has turned a profit on all of their hardware afaik. They may change their mind as they go for a landgrab but to say they don't care is not exactly true.
(2) You can make the same argument that Google and Microsoft don't care about making money on hardware. You can say "but Google and Microsoft rely on third parties" which is historically the case but less so today.
(3) Amazon cuts corners to get to a shock price. If the tablet is "not good enough" as they say then you can't commoditize it yet because the latest specs are worthy of chasing.
(3a) Amazon's high end machine in two and a half months has a SoC that's graphically comparable to what Apple started shipping in March 2011 [1].
(3b) The original Kindle Fire advertised 8 hours of btty life and delivered 6 hours [2]. KF HD doesn't even advertise one that I've seen. If it's 6 hours that's basically unusable for most people. The iPad doesn't last 10 hours because it's a convenient amount of batteries to put in a case of predetermined size. It lasts 10 hours because that's the minimum use case they determined for much of the market (students, professionals, readers, travelers) and things like the thickness of the ipad were driven by the amount of batteries you needed to get to 10 hours.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6158/the-archos-101-xs-review/...
[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5128/amazon-kindle-fire-review...
That does not make any sense. If you think Windows 8 Pro x86 tablets like the Surface Pro(running an Intel Core i5) are competing with the Kindles on features and price, think again. They will be expensive, but far more capable and powerful(heavier and less battery life too). For example, they can run the full Visual Studio or Eclipse.
You can take a Surface Pro and a Kindle Fire with you, run Eclipse with the Android SDK loaded, connect the Kindle Fire to the Surface and take the program you just wrote on the Surface and run it on the Kindle! Or write your code while on a roadtrip or on the subway and debug it on your Android or Windows phone(don't know how Hackintosh it can get for running apps on the iPhone).
Can you do that with a Kindle, iPad or any other tablet on the market right now, which are used by most people as consumption devices?
Where Microsoft is competing with the Kindle, Android tablets and the iPad is with Windows RT, which is a different beast(and costs less than $100 for OEMs + they are rumored to get kickbacks on ecosystem sales). The only big advantage Microsoft has right now in this space is Office RT.
The Galaxy Note 10.1 ships with 2GB RAM and a good SoC. It's more powerful in every way than the PC I was using 5 years ago to write media player UIs.
I don't know when we'll start seeing things like Eclipse running on Android tablets, or if instead app development will trend to HTML and we'll see web-based tooling around that, but I do think that it is on the cards.
I also can't imagine that the Surface tablets (ARM or x86) are going to sell well at all. Not as good as an iPad for tablet things, not as good as a laptop for Office things.
I agree about the quantity of RAM and probably even the GPU, but is there a raw comparison of the CPUs(not just cores and GHz? I strongly suspect your 5 yr old x86 PC is much more powerful than the ARM one in the Galaxy note.
>I don't know when we'll start seeing things like Eclipse running on Android tablets, or if instead app development will trend to HTML and we'll see web-based tooling around that, but I do think that it is on the cards.
I sure wish Eclipse would get on to Android instead of devs moving to HTML just because their tablet does not support a full-on IDE or programming platform.
>I also can't imagine that the Surface tablets (ARM or x86) are going to sell well at all. Not as good as an iPad for tablet things, not as good as a laptop for Office things.
This reminds me of the folks that discounted the iPad because it was not good as a smartphone for portability(oversized iPod Touch) and much less powerful than a laptop.
I agree that the Surface Pro is trying to create a new market here, but I do think there is a big market of people who want a no-compromises powerful portable tablet for on-the-go use.
Also, since they're full versions of Windows, they should just be able to access Hulu, Evernote, and all the other services that expect you to pay extra if you choose to use them on an anemic mobile device.
Not to mention, there are already hands-on reviews rolling in about how laggy the new kindles are.
Here's how the OMAP 4470 actually compares to the A5X in the iPad "3":
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6158/the-archos-101-xs-review/...
tl;dc: beaten by iPad 2 on many benchmarks. A5X >> A5 >= OMAP 4470 > Tegra 3
The same feature is advertised on a lot of phones too, and I just don't get it. Who cares if two speakers half an inch apart are stereo, they're so close together they're always going to sound mono anyways.
Anyway, I agree with the OP that stereo speakers in a device so small, situated so far away from you, is likely not to produce much of the intended effect, unless the intention is featuritis.
Even if these companies had similar business models to Apple, they would be insane to try to complete with Apple on Apple's terms. This is why Microsoft is not really becoming a hardware company[1] and why Amazon is focusing on 'services' (what I call 'experiences')[2].
[1] http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/07/25/a-mouse-and-keyboard-don...
[2] http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/06/07/wanna-compete-with-apple...
I'd definitely pay that for technology that didn't annoy me.
(Disclaimer: most technology annoys me but that's because of the lack of flying cars, etc and me being generally cantankerous)
I've played a bit with the initial Fire tablet and I was really surprised with overall UX. Some Chinese "noname" tablets felt like a better option than "this".
Apple has really high standards in producing their products and user experience from store to watching a movie on iPad. Amazon is good at providing services, but they fail at the overall UX. Maybe that's going to change, maybe HD 8.9 is a huge step forward(i just don't know yet). But for me, the overall experience really matter much more than a price badge on a box. IMHO.
But all the sites that depend on linkbaiting will have a field day for a few weeks.