But for Android consumers, hardware manufacturer is usually a secondary choice. I won't contest that Apple's ahead, but all this survey really points out is that Apple has more control over their branding - consumers have no need to distinguish between Apple, iPad, and iOS. Sure it's not beneficial for manufacturers (in terms of market share) to be competing within a single brand, against a company that controls its brand entirely - that's pretty obvious. It doesn't support a conclusion that "customers want iPads, not Tablets", however, since customers mostly aren't framing their purchasing decisions around hardware manufacturers.
Again, I'm not saying Apple isn't dominating, but it does seem like the question was written with the conclusion already in mind.
Obviously in any big market there may be "lots" of consumers with any characteristic you want. I'm just saying that in my experience, every iPad I've seen has been owned by a previous iOS user. Every single one. Many of these people are geeks and might "have" Android/RIM devices too, but they're uniformly Apple fans. And they bought their iPads because they wanted the iPad. None of them looked at other tablets.
So just like the manufacturers, I think you're fooling yourself, just in the other direction. The iPad isn't "winning" the tablet market. The iPad lives in its own market, and that's a proper subset of the iPhone market.
> "Why would I buy one of these when I could just buy an iPad?" . As of yet, there is not a single competing tablet with a good answer to this question
Perhaps what you're missing (and what the whole Apple philosophy misses) is that there may never be a "single" iPad competitor that is better than the iPad in every respect and yet Android may "win" all the same, because each different model offers something different to someone who values that.
Perhaps you like having an SD card slot. Perhaps you like to plug in a (real) keyboard with a trackpad. Perhaps ultra light weight is your thing. Perhaps you just have to have a real HDMI port. Perhaps you're a 3D junky. Perhaps 9.7inches is just too big - or too small, for you. Perhaps a stylus does it for you. Whatever it is, if there is a segment of consumers who lust after it, there will an Android tablet featuring that. If everyone's killer feature is different then Apple's single-model, uniform approach will never be able to win. In this sense I strongly suspect that Apple is quite happy not winning and knows that they're far better off maximizing profit on 25% of the market that really does all want the same thing rather than trying to cater to the long tail of consumer desires. Let's face it, when it's a choice between profit and market share, Apple always picks profit.
As an Android fan, I'm actually encouraged by this.
Look, when you're buying a tablet, you're buying into an OS/software ecosystem. Yes, people are buying Apple because it's Apple. But they're also buying Apple because of the App Store and because of a proven track record of apps they enjoy and find useful (assuming some previous iPhone/iPod Touch ownership).
But Android doesn't really have the brand thing so much with regard to the individual manufacturers. I have an HTC phone right now, but I don't feel much loyalty to HTC. My next phone might be made by Samsung or Motorola. I don't much care, because I'm loyal to Android, not to the particular manufacturer.
So in that light, the US numbers for next tablet purchase are 50% iOS, 33% Android, 9% RIM, and 8% don't care. And that's not bad, considering that Apple has a good year's head start on Android wrt tablets.
It must become a hardware manufacturer to compete with iPad.
Is Apple a hardware manufacturer re: the iPad? Do they have chip foundries, LCD plants, manufacturing plants?
As you know they certainly don't.
Samsung, on the other hand, does. They make their own...everything. How is that working out for them? Are they destroying Apple with their profit advantages.
It is never so simple. It is actually ridiculously complex, and cargo-cult hand picking of attributes of leaders and losers (while ignoring all of the exceptions) is seldom a useful exercise.
Microsoft has the choice of competing with Android on the tablet low end, or of competing with Apple on the tablet high end.
Another rather questionable analysis, sorry. The iPad dominates because it's cheap (options like the Xoom have been, perversely, more expensive). In what universe is the iPad the "high end"? Further as prices do move down, Apple most certainly is just as heartily in that competition, and we know that a 7" iPad is not far off.
Microsoft needs to make a product that people want. It's as simple as that. Android had faltered on tablets because it was, simply, a terrible tablet OS. It is becoming a very credible contender. Is Windows 8? Time will tell, but I see little to competitively sell it over either ICS or iOS but a lot of hot air and futurist speculation about how Microsoft will somehow leverage their other markets to take over the tablet market (a strategy that has failed miserably for them, but here we are again. How many people actually want Office on a tablet again?)
This is interesting. I'd argue that while vaguely true, this is somewhat irrelevant. If you look at the "rival brands" you'll see that most of them produce Android tablets. So while the hardware guys will all have a very difficult time "dominating" the tablet market, together they all build basically the same ecosystem together, with Apple in a different world. Since the Samsung tablets run the same OS and applications as the HTC and Motorola tablets, I think the more informative information about consumers desires would be a graph of OS mindshare: do you want an Apple OS or a Google OS?
I'm really just an outside observer like everyone else :). But the Surface Pro 3 and even the Surface 3 (S3) aren't really competing with the iPad, they really have different use cases (I do work on my S3, but I'm typing this post in bed on my iPad Air!). So Apple definitely leads in the tablet market by far, but I think we could be more competitive in the prosumer tablet space that they are entering with the iPad pro. More to the point: Apple is basically validating this market, which can only be good for us as long as we can provide a decent alternative (which I think we do). What is clear is that android tablets are in a bit of trouble at all ends...they really need to do some rethinking.
Yes, the presence of the ipad is really hindering the slew of android tablets we are going to see this year.
There is a very good reason as to why Apple has the market share it does. Apple makes the market. Once it's been shown to be profitable, others then join the market, but Apple has used it's first mover advantage very well to create and domante a market.
It wasn't the first to make an mp3 player, but it remade the market. It wasn't the first to have a smartphone, but it remade that market too. In each case, they increased consumer choice by drastically advancing the state of the art. Look at the zune now. Look at the nexus one, the new blackberries. Would those even be here if it weren't for the iPod and iPhone?
So, they may have a big share of the market (as you define it), but they are hardly a monopoly force.
No, it's not my point of view, it's a fact. Apple has never held the majority of smartphone market share.
And my reasoning that Apple will dominate the tablet space is because they have sold arguably the best tablet in numbers that dwarf any other vendor, or all other vendors combined. With the iOS ecosystem supporting it, the chances of another vendor usurping the iPad's lead in the next five years is unlikely.
And what has happened in the mobile space? Apple introduces a smartphone with the goal of 10% of the market. They have had year over year growth in that market, and now are in the mid 30's of share percentage. They dominate the smartphone market when it comes to extracting profit, and have one singular competitor, Samsung, who is beating them in "shipped" units.
If Apple were so unfortunate to have the tablet market follow what it has done in the smartphone market, there will be a lot of happy Apple shareholders in the future.
Why is anyone happy that it is only an iPad market? Do they expect Apple to continually innovate in a non-competitive market? If you like tablets and not just Apple, you want to see more contenders in the market not less.
I don't dispute that user experience is a factor, but I did not include it in the above based on the following reasoning; If Apple's UX was sufficient to keep an equivalent product running Android with equal or better technical performance off the market, then Android phones would not currently outnumber Apple phones.
Manufacturing a technically competitive tablet form factor device is not something that can be taken on by a small start up. Creating a better UX is well within the reach of a wide variety of shops from small to large.
The G1->N1->N2 evolution is a nice empirical example of the presence of competitive hardware allowing for a rapidly developed competitive UX.
Android based phones aren't playing 'catch up' any more, once we have a reasonable execution of Android in a tablet form factor I reason that they will catch and surpass iPad volume and sales. If a technically superior platform was released ahead of an iPad refresh then I reason that platform would take substantial share from current and future iPad sales.
(I personally dislike tablets as a form factor and have both an iPad and Android tablet gathering dust, but people do seem to keep buying Android tablets.)
I currently make my living in mobile and tablet software development, so I try to keep pretty well abreast of the market. My comment was not based upon my evaluation of competing products, but rather on market acceptance and sales of competing products. By some estimates, the best-selling Android Tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab) has only had a sell-through to customers of 250k units, compared to 7.33 million iPads that were sold the last quarter. That's not really competitive at all.
I think Apple has the sense that the iPad will dominate the tablet market like the iPod has dominated the mp3 market. The main reason Android has overtaken # sales of smartphone is because of the price tax that the carriers (and also Apple) has taken. But Apple doesn't have the carriers to worry about with the tablet (cause most people are buying the wifi versions). And they've decided they're going to compete on price with the iPad, just like they did with the iPod and iPod Touch. After watching the keynote, it's hard to see the competition creating a better tablet (hardware, software, design, apps) for a cheaper price. Apple has integrated the whole process of innovation, and they're way ahead... and this shows the most in the iPad.
>the only other major options for consumers are Microsoft-based //
Not heard of Android then?
"Apple's market share in tablet segment slipped from 64 percent to 57 percent in Q4, 2011, According to the research reports from iSuppli, Amazon's Kindle with an impressive 14 percent growth in the market snagged a large share of iPad sales in Q4, 2011." (http://www.91mobiles.com/blog/10192/Apple+iPad+tablet+market...)
"In Forrester’s analysis, Samsung has a 5 percent share; Motorola 4 percent and Acer a 3 percent share. HP’s TouchPad, now discontinued, had a 6 percent share, but that was during that series of crazy fire sales when everyone suddenly rushed to buy one." (http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/forrester-no-android-tablet...)
TechCrunch here estimates Kindle Fire to have sold 40% as many units as iPad for the "holiday quarter".
Stories like this are interesting me because while sales numbers show Android doing well, usage numbers from all over the internet seem to indicate that not many people are actually using their Android tablets, at least not in the numbers people are using iPads.
And then you read the last paragraph and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.
>And while Android appears to be making headway against Apple and the iPad, the truth is that Apple remains the top selling tablet brand by a huge margin. While Apple sold the aforementioned 14.5 million tablets from April through June, Samsung was the closest competitor to the Cupertino based manufacturer with 8.1 million tablets sold. in the period.
> The dominance of the iPad has always been about the walled garden and iTunes.
I really can't agree. I believe the dominance of the iPad stems from an operating system designed for touch input instead of having it shoehorned in like Windows did for years.
Android tablets will do just fine for the same reason. They've been struggling thus far because it's currently hard to match Apple on price - they've done a hell of a job in supply chain management.
Again, I'm not saying Apple isn't dominating, but it does seem like the question was written with the conclusion already in mind.
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