Why Can't Anyone Make A Popular Tablet?
I've been thinking a lot about the popularity of tablets and the problems manufacturers face coming up against the iPad. The devices that we see here at CG are all pretty amazing - even the Playbook was a cool, if flawed, device - but no one device seems to be able to grab any traction.
Context & Ripple Effects
The tablet question has inverted over fifteen months. In January 2010 the argument was whether anyone needed an Apple tablet, or any other at all; by September 2010 the problem was too many candidates, with five tablets already revealed vying for the category Apple had just defined. What none of those launches solved was the software side.
That gap is now the story: RIM's PlayBook shipped this month to reviews that praised the hardware but flagged the missing apps, per the New York Times' April 14 coverage, and CNET's October 2010 look at Intel and Microsoft showed even the Wintel establishment struggling to answer the iPad on its own terms. CrunchGear's piece lands at the moment the hardware-versus-ecosystem mismatch has become undeniable.
First-order effects
- RIM's PlayBook competes as well-reviewed but under-supported hardware — the NYT's app-gap critique means buyers are weighing a device against a store they can't use yet.
- Every manufacturer showing tablets this season is priced and judged against the iPad by default, so differentiation has to come from specs and industrial design rather than software.
Second-order effects
- Intel and Microsoft face pressure to prove the Wintel playbook transfers to tablets, since CNET's October 2010 reporting framed their iPad response as unresolved — if x86-plus-Windows doesn't stick here, both lose a form factor.
- Carriers and retailers stocking non-iPad tablets must subsidize or bundle harder to move inventory, absorbing margin on devices that lack the ecosystem pull.
Third-order effects
- If app availability keeps deciding purchases, tablet competition consolidates around platform gatekeepers who control the stores, and hardware makers become interchangeable suppliers of glass and silicon.
- A market where no challenger gains traction invites consolidation — weaker entrants exit or reposition, leaving the category structured around whoever owns distribution of applications rather than whoever ships the best device.
The trend: Tablets are becoming an ecosystem market in which control of the application store, not hardware quality, determines which devices achieve traction.