What's on the Table for Tablets This Year [Personal Technology]
Lots of consumers are planning to buy tablet computers this year, and lots of companies are hoping to sell them. Apple managed to sell around 15 million of its ground-breaking iPads last year in only nine months, and …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands almost exactly one year after analysts projected the then-unreleased Apple tablet as a nearly $3 billion first-year business — a call that proved conservative once Apple confirmed roughly 15 million iPads sold in just nine months of 2010. The intervening year filled in the supply side too: back in March 2010 Arm counted over 50 iPad-like devices slated for release, and by August U.S. buyers were signaling they were hungry for slates beyond the iPad itself.
So the question at the start of 2011 is no longer whether a tablet market exists — Apple answered that — but whether any of the dozens of challengers can carve out share against an incumbent with a nine-month head start, a proven price point, and an ecosystem already in place.
First-order effects
- Every tablet maker shipping in 2011 enters against a concrete benchmark rather than a hypothesis: Apple's ~15 million units in nine months defines both the scale of the prize and the bar for relevance.
- Consumers who expressed interest in non-iPad slates in the August 2010 coverage finally get real alternatives this year, turning the category from a one-product market into an actual competitive field.
Second-order effects
- Silicon and component vendors sit on the winning side either way: with 50-plus announced devices built on Arm-based designs, chipset demand scales with the whole category, not with any single vendor's fortunes.
- Apple's pricing power becomes the forcing function — challengers must undercut or differentiate against a product whose cost structure is already amortized across 15 million units, squeezing margins for late entrants.
Third-order effects
- If even a fraction of the announced devices sell at meaningful volume, tablets consolidate into a second mainstream computing platform alongside laptops, reshaping how PC makers, carriers, and software developers allocate R&D and shelf space.
- The pattern — one vendor defining a category, then dozens racing in — sets up the industry for the familiar shakeout phase, where most of the 50-plus entrants exit and a handful of platform owners absorb the market.
The trend: Tablets are completing their move from single-vendor novelty to a contested mainstream computing category, with 2011 as the year the challenger wave meets the incumbent's installed base.