I can't has cheezburger

“Oh no he di’n’t!”

I was having a civil conversation with some guy who was trying to explain to me how Apple would do much better business if they made cheaper computers (apparently in his universe Dell was kicking Apple’s ass in revenues, profit margins, and total cash on hand) and then he went and said that 2011 was going to be the year of the tablet and he insinuated that iPad was going to be knocked off of its throne as leader of the tablet market.

If for some reason you truly believe that, let’s think about a few things:

1. Tablets have been around for many years.  All of the technologies that are in iPad weren’t anything revolutionarily new.  The reason none of the tablet manufacturers pre-iPad made it big was because their tablets sucked and nobody wanted them. If they have any greater degree of success now in a post-iPad world, it’s probably going to be because they finally had a decent implementation to rip off.  Does that sound familiar?  It should.  Look at phones pre-iPhone and phones designed about 6 months after iPhone came out.  iPhone still absolutely fucking dominates, though.  Despite the existence of a shit ton of Android phones on a shit ton of providers made by a shit ton of manufacturers (not to mention having a shit ton of variations on the stock OS), Android keeps up with iPhone.

2. Apple has hardware advantages that no other tablet manufacturer can even come close to.  They are heavily involved with their hardware design. They rarely use cheap off-the-shelf parts; they always take extra effort to design things themselves (even things like cables and chargers, which are always pretty lousy on competitors’ devices).  They’ve worked closely with hardware partners to have high quality parts at a great price.  Take the LCD screen on iPad, for instance.  It’s a full 9 inches, which is something other tablet manufacturers can’t achieve, and even if they can, they aren’t putting in a great IPS display; it’s often some cheapo LCD display.  Apple is the world’s #1 buyer of NAND flash memory, giving them a lot of negotiating leverage. By having such great control over the entire manufacturing process, the iPad can be a $500 device when a competitor couldn’t produce one of the same quality for that price at all.

3. Apple also has a pretty great software advantage.  In fact, iOS really is the iPad (after all, the whole device is just a screen), and Apple has made that fantastic.  It’s built on OS X, which was already a secure, fast and rock solid stable OS, and that also gives iPad fluid graphics, 3D acceleration, and good APIs for developers to make great apps with.  As a result, iPad has a solid apps ecosystem already, and it keeps growing daily.  Anyone else who wants to come onto the scene now has to either be walking out the door with that polish and awesomeness (which is the result of years of constant iteration on Apple’s part) or a new tablet would have to somehow introduce this revolutionary new feature to the scene which changes everything, then build off of that.  Given that most of the groundbreaking revolutions in the mobile space have been coming from Cupertino, I don’t really see that trend changing.  A lot of competitors have tried gaining traction against iPhone by yelling that they can do things iPhone cant, saying things like “removable battery and storage!”  (really, who gives a fuck?)  “Physical keyboard!” “Flash support!” “Multitasking!”  Usually those features don’t work all that well, or they’re features people keep saying they really want, but don’t really need or end up using.  Most importantly, these phones failed to get right what iPhone did so well, which amounted to simple things like a fluid feeling with inertial scrolling, good music and media syncing with iTunes, etc.

Apple has created a pretty interesting situation, because iPad basically introduced itself as its own class of device, and it the only one of its kind.  I don’t see a bunch of competitors coming and filling the space up to the point where you start saying “tablet;” I’m pretty sure it’s just going to be an iPad world.  Is that good or bad?  I’m not sure, but I get the instinct that it’s going to be good, because the iPad seems to surround itself with higher quality stuff, whether that stuff is apps, accessories, or whatever.

In closing, I suppose this might be considered the “year of the tablet” in that a bunch of people are going to try to strike it rich selling various models of them, but I think that the tablet is going to continue to be the iPad.

Peace out.