“Why Should Somebody Buy This Instead of an iPad?”
It's been fifteen months since the first iPad shipped. Nearly every sizable company that makes anything that looks even sort of like a computer or a phone has rushed into the market that Apple created. Many of these companies haven't yet shipped the tablets they've announced.
Context & Ripple Effects
Fifteen months after the first iPad launch, the field Apple created has filled with announcements rather than products — as this year's tablet preview and the roundup of best-revealed tablets both showed, most of what competitors promised in late 2010 still has not reached shelves. The Technologizer piece distills the buyer's dilemma into one question that every announced rival must answer at retail: why choose it over an iPad?
First-order effects
- Rival makers with announced-but-unshipped tablets lose the only window that mattered — the gap between Apple's head start and their arrival — while early adopters default to the iPad by absence of alternatives.
Second-order effects
- Corporate buyers weighing a tablet rollout, the audience the New York Times flagged for a flood of office-ready rivals, face a de facto single-vendor shortlist until a competitor ships something that answers the differentiation question; component and OS partners like Intel and Microsoft, whose tablet positioning CNET examined, inherit pressure to make those delayed devices credible.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tablet market consolidates around Apple's integrated model — echoing Silicon Alley Insider's March assessment that the iPad 2 extended a multi-year lead — while laggards are pushed toward adjacent plays like the content-commerce angle paidContent argued actually strengthens Amazon's position.
The trend: The tablet market is bifurcating into Apple's shipping platform and a long tail of announced-but-undelivered challengers, with each quarter of delay hardening the incumbent's advantage.