iPad 2

[vidarh]

@Kolla you are thinking of the iPad like it's a "PC" device... It isn't, the average Joe on the street really doesn't care about all that tech stuff... And that I guess is why iPads sell and other tablets don't!

iPad sold well last year because it was first to market, and there were no viable competitors until late in the year. Pretty much all analysts I've seen expect Apple's sales to be significantly outnumbered by competitor within a year, though they might remain the largest individual player.

Just like Android is easily overtaking iOS as a larger platform despite Apple's lead.

So to say that other tablets don't sell is misleading.

[vidarh]

I'm waiting to see it play out but I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple still have over 2/3s of the tablet market a year from now.

A year from now, in total units sold, maybe, given the massive head start they have. But they're too expensive and too closed and too limited in terms of different form factors and catering to different customer needs to hold on to their lead in number of new units sold for very long.

[vidarh]

Too expensive? IPads are the cheapest of the lot!

Nonsense.

Or for a slightly more expensive version

Cheapest at equivalent specs, possibly, but there are a ton of Android pads in the sub-200 pound market.

Most of them are probably of horrible quality, but then again people buy cheap netbooks and flimsy plastic laptops too (me included - my Acer laptop has the same spec as a Macbook that costs 3 times as much, but there's no getting around that the build quality of the Acer is atrocious in comparison, but that's ok, I got what I paid for).

[vidarh]

@vidarh

Those are 7 inch ARM 11 tablets with minimal specs.  Resistive single touch screens, 256 MB of RAM (which likely means no Honeycomb).

Go out there and find a ten inch capacitive multi-touch dual core ARM8 or ARM9 tablet with 16 GB of storage.  Add a 5 MP rear facing camera and a 1.3 MP front facing one.  The tablet should have a minimum 512 MB of RAM.  

You entirely miss the point. Netbooks outsell Macbooks. Cheap, entry level Windows laptops outsell Macbooks. The bottom fell out of the non-Mac laptop market because most people care more about price than build quality and design, and realize that the cheap goods are *sufficient* even if they're not as great as the iPad.

People buy far more cheap practical cars than expensive sports cars too...

You'll see the same with the iPad vs. exactly the type of cheap, crappy pads I pointed to, that are not in any way comparable to the iPad, but that are cheap enough that the vast majority who don't lightly spend 300 pounds+ for a gadget when many of them don't even have a desktop or laptop might consider buying them.

In fact, these pads will sell in vast quantities just because of people looking for bargains, that finds these pads in heaps at low price outlets as something they can buy on a whim. Some of these pads are in the price range where they might find their way into discount isles in super markets.

Apple will probably make several times as much profit per unit, because high margin products is where they shine, but there's just no way they'll not be massively beaten on number of units given the price level they've put themselves on.

[vidarh]

Still, claiming the iPad isn´t the cheapest option and pointing to a noname slim-spec Android 2.x tablet is like comparing a Ferrari and a Yugo with the motivation that they are both cars.

Which would be a fair comparison if someone claims that a Ferrari is the cheapest car on the market, when it clearly isn't.

If they claimed it was the cheapest luxury sports car, then maybe, maybe not, I'm not up on prices on luxury sports cars. Similarly if the claim had been that iPad was the cheapest high spec'ed pad, then maybe, but that wasn't the claim I addressed.

[vidarh]

analysts?  like the ones that told everyone Apple was dead at $12 per share?  Or the ones that didn't see the GFC coming?

Apple's iPad is mimicing the iPod phenomenon: plenty of better quality mp3 players with more features and Apple still got 85% of the market.

The big difference is that the iPod is an accessory to iTunes, the iPod itself isn't really the product. People buy an iPod if they want the simplicity of the whole iTunes experience, not for the features of the device itself. It also has price options that are low enough for impulse buys even for people with relatively low income.

iPhone vs. Android has shown that that's very different in a situation where the price is higher and the functionality of the device itself is a bigger deal, even with the iPhone getting that significant head start.

The iPad is far more likely to play out like the iPhone than the iPod, with a massive surge early on but gradually being overtaken simply because the massive number of competitors filling a vast number of niches that matter, whereas in the music player market this is largely uninteresting.

[vidarh]

Maybe they could collaborate with some partners out there though, so they get some corporate IT friends otherwise things are going to get very lonely.

Their stated policy is pretty much the opposite: They want to own the whole stack, hence their CPUs for the iPad etc.. Expect them to try to get rid of their partners one by one everywhere else too, as soon as they think it's viable.

[vidarh]

OK i know this may be off topic but....

Imho it depends on what you called music. There is a problem with music being made easy in that it becomes harder and harder to seperate the talent from the talentless. Singers who are tone deaf are suddenly good singers.

Personally, I don't care. I don't care if the result is because the artist is good or because he/she is good at picking tools that mask their weaknesses. What I care about is the end product. If the end product sounds good, then I'll listen.

If the whole thing was composed and arranged by an artificial intelligence, and all the artist did was press a button, then so be it.

All this does is *change* the skills and talent that is required to make works that stand out.

Then again, most of the music I like the most is largely electronic...

[vidarh]

Gawd... what a sad & crazy statement to make...

How on earth could you class someone as an Artist if all they did "was press a button"...

The point I was making is that what I care about it the product, it doesn't matter much to me how they get to that product. Obviously, if all they needed to do was pressing a button, the real artist would be whomever developed the system actually producing the music.

Without going into my likes & dislikes of what I call music and artists, a simple fact remains if an Artist or Band cant play well live then they are indeed talentless...

I disagree. Playing live vs. composing music vs. putting on a good stage show are three different, orthogonal skills, and few artists have all three.

For something that exemplifies this well, look at electronic music pioneers like Jarre and Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk aren't even on stage during the performance of some of their work, and most of the members are for larger parts of the shows pretty much just performing stage shows rather than playing music (one of them triggers a speech synthesizer instead of singing himself, for example), though they *can* play too.

Jarre does tend to play and have band members play, but it's largely theatrics as most of his pieces could easily enough just be pre-programmed into his synths.

In both cases their main talent is composing and the stage shows, and actually playing the music live is an optional element.

On the other hand, most pop artists these days don't compose their own material - their talent is performing, not composing or writing lyrics.

Which ones are the true "artists"? It depends entirely on what aspect you find most interesting. I care about the music, not the performance beyond what is needed to make it sound good.

If their performance can be assisted by tools, I really don't care, as long as the end result is good. If the tools become the majority of their performance, all that changes is that their talents are in how they use the tools rather than in singing or playing an instrument - they still need to find a way to make their performance stand out.