As I said I fully appreciate that technically the iPad is behind its competitors at a greater cost.Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainRaiden
However as my wife often says, things are worth what people pay for them, ie if Apple makes significant in-roads into the small tablet market with the price they're asking then it won't have been overpriced. If they fail then it is. Let the market decide.
Why? Because consumers are more interested in the content thats made available on tablets.Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainRaiden
Lets get this straight. You're a geek and you love the technical aspects. Many people who buy tablets are also geeks. However the mainstream consumer is not a geek. They are not going to understand what a snapdragon processor is or what resolution their tablet has and whether its that much better or worse than the competitions. There are of course big boundaries like the ability to watch HD or not (and Apple is taking a big risk with that) but for the main this is true.
If you are going to sell 100s of millions of tablets you are selling to the mainstream, not to geeks.
Read this article:
iPad and Beyond: The Future of the Tablet Market | 1782214
Specifically this bit:
However, many vendors are making the same mistake that was made as a first response to the iPhone: they are prioritizing hardware features and technologies (see "Hype Cycle for Consumer Technologies, 2011" ) over applications, services and overall user experience.
They are also marketing these features as if consumers know what they mean, as with the Verizon's Motorola Xoom commercial: "Your wife will love the new Tegra 2 dual-core chipset." Tablets will be much more dependent on ecosystems than smartphones have been and the sooner vendors realize that, the better chance they have of competing head to head with Apple. HP's recent decision to abandon production of webOS products is a clear example of the pressure that vendors are under when trying to sell tablets (see "HP Drops webOS Devices, Creates Potential for Sale or Licensing" ). Rather than focusing on higher hardware specifications, vendors should be looking at partnering with content providers to deliver unique and compelling content to be consumed on their tablets. Alternatively, vendors should offer incentives to developers to create applications that fully exploit the capability of the tablet form-factor, to deliver a unique experience.
Consumers are buying tablets because of what they can do with them, and so applications, content and services, intuitive user interfaces and a good design are the vital attributes that have an impact on user experience and ultimately drive sales, not hardware features. This is why Apple still has an enormous advantage over its competitors in this segment at comparable prices. While other vendors focus on browsing the Internet and watching video on a tablet, Apple has been teaching consumers about the powerful synergy between apps and multitouch that deliver an experience that cannot be easily replicated on a PC.
This isn't from a techie website, its from a marketing research site that looks at the decisions that go into buying tablets.
If you think that a product that got over 70% market share (at its peak) of an entire market got that purely due to Apple fans then I'm afraid you're seriously deluded.Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainRaiden
If you want to actually understand how Apple does what it does you need to seriously start thinking deeper. What they've done has happened before in many other industries, especially car manufacturing once the market and product matures enough that things other than the hardware specifications become important enough.
