Posted on 12/12/2011 2:59:53 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Apple Starts to Wobble 2 Months After Jobs' Death
Two months since the death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the firm's management is showing signs of wobbling. The market shares of the iPhone and iPad are declining, and a series of patent-infringement lawsuits against rivals are not entirely going to plan.
Apple's competitors, who were caught on the back foot by the iPhone and iPad, are rapidly releasing products aimed at toppling the leader.
◆ Shrinking Demand
U.S. market research firm Canaccord Genuity recently said Apple's share of the American table PC market is forecast to fell from 74 percent in the third quarter to 53.2 percent in the fourth, with the decisive blow being dealt by Amazon's cheap Kindle Fire, which costs just US$199. The Kindle Fire is likely to grab some 20 percent of the market in only 1.5 month since its release on Oct. 15, on the back of the low price and access to Amazon's huge content.
The iPhone 4S, the last product overseen by Jobs, is also losing its appeal. Some dealers in Korea have already slashed prices by W100,000 (US$1=W1,146) since the product was launched in early November. The phone is also subject to complaints about the short battery life and static and disrupted signal during phone calls. But the main reason is probably that consumers are waiting for the release of the all-new iPhone5 later next year, since the 4S was merely an upgrade of the 4.
KT and SK Telecom, which market the iPhone 4S in Korea, have been caught off guard by lackluster demand, since Apple apparently asked dealers to buy a batch of at least 500,000 units. SK is said to be having trouble selling out the initial batch. And because of the popularity of fourth-generation LTE protocol, SK is focusing more on selling LTE phones than the 3G iPhone 4S. So far KT and SK have sold only a combined 300,000 units. An SK Telecom official said the gadget "has become a headache."
◆ Rivals Going on Offensive
A court in Mannheim, Germany ruled Friday that Apple infringed Motorola's third-generation mobile communications standards and banned the sale of the iPhone and iPad. That could increase the chances of Samsung Electronics, which has also filed a patent suit against Apple in the same town.
PC makers, which were badly hurt by the popularity of the iPhone and iPad, have also gone on the offensive, releasing so-called "ultrabooks," an industry standard for the next generation of laptops recently unveiled by Intel. Ultrabooks are half as thick and weigh half as much as existing laptops, and it takes just a third of the time to boot them.
But analysts say Apple's heyday is not over yet because it still boasts strong software and content. The app store, which opened in July of 2008, saw 10 billion accumulated downloads as of January of this year and reached 18 billion 10 months later, showing how much clout the company still wields among consumers.
My take is this, apple will indeed lose its premium status in the tablet and phone market (its already happening in the phone market).. but the tablet its a bit further out yet.. but the premium mark up will deminish and become more commodity priced basically based on market pressure.
For now, Apple has no real competition in the Tablet market.. Android Honeycomb wasn’t remotely a competitor no matter what hardware you put on it. Ice Cream might be, don’t know haven’t played with it, but eventually android OS will have a table offering that makes the deltas small enough that the premium price point will decline.. right now though there is NOTHING out there.
You can sell a $200 tablet, and the Fire is the first in that price range with Honeycomb on it, so its in the marketplace a relative bargain, its priced where current tablets are that were runnign Android 2.2 or older, which wasn’t even a tablet version of the OS. So Fire has proven something already known, there is more demand for a tablet at $200 than there is for one at $500... no brainer. However this isn’t remotely a case where people are looking at a Fire and an iPad and selecting the Fire out of superiority... folks who can afford an iPad are still buying the iPad, and I don’t see that changing for a while yet.
It will change, don’t get me wrong, but Apple’s probably got about a 1 year to 18 month spread, maybe more, before that can happen. WHEN a comparable android tablet arrives with a price point of $200-$300 you will see a true threat to the iPad, but right now, comparable Android Tablets, all are priced within $100 of the iPad or just as much, and that’s NOT going to motivate sales, when other variable are considered.
When a $300 or less Android Tablet running Ice Cream or better shows up, you will see iPad face a real threat.. Fire isn’t goign to take away iPad’s dominance, but it will move software development to Droid Tablets, which in turn will make that $300 Android tablet with a similar form factor that will eventually show up, have an even lower delta vs the iPad than it does today.
Apple knows this is coming, and I am sure they are hard at work at coming up with even more and better differenciators... also on the horizon is the Windows 8(?) tablets.. That’s currently an unknown, but a tablet that runs all your existing windows stuff at or below the price point of the iPad is going to be another risk/threat to apple, and probably a bigger one.. because Windows will have defacto in with business... if it runs all the same stuff they already run, making the windows platform your tablet platform becomes a no brainer solution. We’ll see how it all plays out.. but of the existing threats to iPad’s dominance, Fire aint it.
I understand that win8 will also allow for kinect on regular computers.
Author is criticizing Apple’s path based on where the puck is now.
That’s not where Apple is going, because that’s not where the puck will be.
Apple is not in the $200 tablet market. When current iPad equivalence can be had for $200, their $500 model will still have $300 more capability.
Microsoft Security Essentials is very good and free. It is all the security I use on my Win7 home computer. But I think corporations and businesses need more security than that. Maybe Kapersky
Microsoft Security Essentials could have come out years ago but Microsoft was scared of another anti-trust suit. But with Apple becoming real competition.....Then MS knew they would not be subject to anti-trust
Apple Stock price $391.84 at closing yesterday... Apple Stock closing price on the day after Steve Jobs' death $375.75.
Wobbling? Right. Sure.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Except the current management, Tim Cook, has been running Apple officially for four months, not two. He has also been the sit-in CEO when Jobs was sick for quite a while longer. As far as simply vision, Jobs is said to have stuffed Apple with at least four years of products.
If Apple is going to falter without Jobs, it’s not going to happen this fast.
Windows Phone 7 will become obsolete when Windows (Phone) 8 drops, but that was pretty much in the cards from the day it launched. What Microsoft is doing is unifying their phone/tablet/desktop OS, not too dissimilar to Apple's OS X/iOS approach; the same codebase and shared interface elements. I see Windows 8 moving to tablets as converging from both above (desktops) and below (phones).
MS is going a step further than Apple in making the Metro interface available on the desktop, where Apple is adopting iOS interface elements piecemeal; we'll see if it makes sense and if anyone uses it that way. MS is also walking back its earlier plan to run desktop apps on tablets, probably because someone tried to actually use Photoshop on a touch screen.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft offered a tablet OS a decade ago. More people bought iPads in the first year (possibly in the first quarter) than Windows tablets in ten years. Apple's innovation, one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect, is that multitouch and something like a phone interface is the way to use a tablet, not poking with a stylus at an interface that was built for a mouse.
Voice control just isn't go to be compatible with the typical open office environments.
I think it'll be in the mix. It won't replace the mouse or keyboard shortcuts, but I can see it being useful for short queries; in the middle of typing, "Siri, how do you spell 'discombobulate?'" or "Siri, what's the population of Iceland?" is quicker than shifting over to a Web browser and searching google.
I'm currently putting together a project that puts a typical desktop app on the tablet, but simple things like sorting and indexing large compressed files harkens back to the days of the 640K PCs with extremely limited memory heap.
I think that's A Good Thing. As desktop and laptop specs exploded, programmers got lazy, knowing they could just throw more hardware at it. Each generation of developers needs to be challenged every now and then to write tight code under resource constraints. Look at the original 1984 Macintosh -- it had a complete OS with a GUI and a couple of apps on a 400K floppy. Programming that took care and skill.
Nope. The Kindle Fire is running Amazon's own fork of Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") with a custom interface designed to more or less hide its androidness.
Certainly true, and most of them have been borderline-unusable crap. But I wouldn't lump the Kindle Fire in with those. The Fire has a specific set of functions, and an interface optimized for them; it's more limited than the iPad (or the Galaxy Tab or Motorola Xoom or other general-purpose tablets), and both its price tag and its marketing reflect that. By all accounts, like the e-ink based Kindles before it, it focuses on its limited number of functions and does those very well.
A lot of analysis focuses solely on market share and thus misses the point. I don't think the Kindle Fire will take many sales away from the iPad; what they will do is expand the tablet market as a whole, bringing in folks who have $200 but not $500 worth of movie-watching and Web-surfing they want to do (my solution was a $300 used iPad). Apple will continue to have a smaller slice of a rapidly-growing pile, and for at least a couple more years will continue to sell as many iPads as they can make.
Why? Just curious, I have the original iPad - I was one of the first pre-order customers when the origional was available for pre-ordering. Got the Wi-Fi only 64 Gig, and I use it daily.
Primarily, I use it for emailing, web surfing and reading. Love the Kindle App, and finding myself actually preferring it to iBooks in that I can retreive my Kindle books on any device; instead of being locked into Apple devices.
I have some DVD ripping software (Cucusoft) and rip my DVD collection down to ~1 GB files, so I have ~30 movies with me at any time. But, here's why I am wondering why you want to upgrade - as I can't see any compelling reason. Retina display means I need to increase my movie filesize to realize the improved display. Game play on the iPad is marginal - as you are placing your fingers all over the screen, it's hard to be immersed in the game (unlike a console). I can wait 3 seconds for my books to load, I just don't read that fast. 10 hours battery life after 2 years and I'm fine with that. I Hotspot to my iPhone, so I cannot see a reason to get the 3G/4G accessory. I do like the iDVD softare, which does not run on the first generation - but that is the only reason I can see in upgrading. All in all, the orgional iPad was a 9.95/10 product, with the iPad 2 being 10/10. So, why do you want to upgrade? Just curious ... I'd love to get a 'new' one; I just can't justify it.
Fire may do it’s thing better than like-priced competitors, but people will still be expecting grater capability at an impulse price.
Microsoft always lowers the price of Windows, right.
They didn't exist because no one wanted one, I was told that repeatedly because they were not a computer so what on earth would you do with it. :)
Running 2.3??? What crap.. In that case it is definitely nothing but smoke and mirrors.. a lot of folks are going to be disappointed.
Why anyone would buy a tablet with the PHONE version of the OS on it is beyond me.... You can buy those for $150 or less all day long.
If this is true, Kindle is nothing but a bunch of smoke and mirrors.. it’ll sell well innitially, but quickly fall off a cliff. 7” form factor AND 2.3??? Wow, that’s going to wear thin really fast.
I thought we were talking tech gadgets and not software
“I like how the author is using as evidence for Apple’s wobble that people aren’t buying a phone now because they are waiting for Apple’s IPhone5.”
Yep. This article also ignores the fact that the iPhone 4S has the highest customer satisfaction rating of any iPhone ever, at 98%.
The Kindle Fire may take some “tablet” market share from the iPad, but it has had a rocky debut. Further, it and the iPad don’t really aim at the same functionality. I expect there will be a 7” screen iPad at some point, at something like a $300 price point which will play very well against the Fire. (BTW from what I’ve read the new B&N tablet at $249 is head and shoulders above the Fire, and you can read Amazon content on it.)
“Why upgrade.”
‘cause I want to. It’s that simple. I want the new one. I have the money. It’s a toy. I don’t “justify” toys...I just buy them.
Being able to “skype” with kids and grandkids will be cool.
There are apps that don’t run well on the original already.
There are lots of good games for the iPad. Just not the same type as you play on PS3 or Xbox.
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