Please don’t ruin Steve’s hard work to deliver the Apple experience to you.
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Apple has never really been successful in the latter days of the PC industry. Steve never thought you had to cater to the desires of the customer base — only his narrow “apple proprietary” dictatorship that fashioned a number of failed products that only cater to a narrow base of users.
His iPad is a joke. Overpriced, under-equipped, a joke of a CPU that should have been something akin to the Intel Atom to permit other OS’s. Totally pathetic I/O for user interface. And made as proprietary as Steve could to lock the Apple-Bots into buying lots of overpriced Apple peripheral support.
HP will easily kick Apples’ butt in this horserace, with only a little smart marketing and design.
Yeah, and the Zune is going to crush the iPod
That's exactly what they were saying when the iPod came out in the early 2000s. In fact, companies like HP and Sony had a couple of years to react to the iPod as it was slow at first to gather steam.
However, despite having much more research and development resources at their disposal (at the time), HP, Sony and all the other major players in the consumer electronics industry were caught napping as Apple built a juggernaut with the iPod, literally taking over the entire music industry, and becoming unstoppable. Even today, they are so far ahead of the curve with the iPod that even if they stopped developing the product line today, it would take five years for their rivals to catch up. The only product that comes even close to iPod is Microsoft's Zune - but 75% of Americans will never buy a Zune simply because...it's a Microsoft product!
They then went on to repeat history with the iPhone. Despite having one hand tied behind their back (with AT&T), Apple is running circles around their competitors in the cell phone market. Sure, Apple is still behind in market share but they are closing the gap quickly and once they announce later this year that AT&T is no longer their only carrier, they will not be able to make iPhones fast enough come Christmas time.
Now the iPad. Now I'm not an Apple fan-boy or anything (I'm typing this post on a Microsoft computer) but it is obvious to all that the iPad is going to be the most successful consumer product in the history of human civilization and it will REPLACE the desktop and laptop computer.
Repeat: The Apple iPad will REPLACE the desktop and laptop computer. Maybe not with this version. In fact, definitely not with this version. Take a look at the 1st generation iPod (from 2001) and compare it to the iPod touch of today. Why it is like comparing Orville and Wilbur Wright's airplane to an F-15 Tomcat.
So it is not today's iPad that will conquer the computer industry but future iterations of the iPad that will. Once this product is perfected (around the 3rd or 4th generation), there will simply be no reason to ever buy a desktop computer or a laptop again.
This is my sales forecast (worldwide) for the iPad. Check this post in future years to see how right I am:
2010 - 6.5 million units
2011 - 13.8 million units
2012 - 44.7 million units
2013 - 121.2 million units
2014 - 255.7 million units
2015 - 438.3 million units
2016 - 929.1 million units
2017 - 1.33 billion units
2018 - 2.68 billion units
2019 - 3.48 billion units