In Case You Don't Realize How Fast Apple's iPad Business Has Gone Down The Tubes ...
This launch can't come soon enough. — It wasn't long ago that Apple fans were slapping each other on the back and crowing about how, one day, Apple would be known as “the iPad company.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple’s tablet story began with early iPad sellouts, but the surrounding coverage quickly focused on the product’s harder long-term test: why buyers should choose it over alternatives and whether media partners could make the format distinctive. The 2011 assessment of the case for buying an iPad over competing devices and calls for a new blueprint for iPad magazines frame the reported business decline as a weakening of that broader proposition, not merely an initial-demand problem.
First-order effects
- Apple enters its impending iPad launch with pressure to arrest a sharply declining tablet business and renew the product’s appeal to buyers.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and media partners seeking distribution through iPad face greater pressure to demonstrate that their apps and magazine formats add value beyond the device itself.
Third-order effects
- If tablet demand increasingly depends on differentiated content and services rather than launch momentum, device makers’ leverage will shift toward the partners that make those experiences compelling.
The trend: Tablets are moving from an early hardware-adoption story toward a contest over sustained buyer value and the content ecosystems that support it.