The proper price for a tablet

[andrewducker]

HP released the 16GB touchpad at £350. Nobody bought it.

They then decided to get out of that market and dropped the price to £89 in order to get rid of them. They sold out pretty much instantly.

And now they seem to be selling on ebay consistently for about £200.

Which tells us that for an average 10" tablet that's not an iPad, the correct price to sell them at is probably around that, if you want to go mass market.

The problem being that nobody seems to be able to make them that cheaply. About as good as it gets seems to be the Archos 101, which looks distinctly old-fashioned now.

I suspect I'll be holding off for at least a year, probably two, before I end up with one. At the moment, they just aren't worth the money for one that's worth having.

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I read that the plan was to have them at around $250 by now, but the Japan earthquake destroyed the plants that were capable of manufacturing some of he essential parts at that price point (the screens I think but I can't remember for sure) leading to a shortage of those parts and price gauging by other factories that could make the parts creating a temporary price spike at the consumer level.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The hysteria over the HP touchpad was quite remarkable, I'm not sure if £200 is a fair reflection of what people would ordinarily pay, or if thats inflated slightly due to the weird MUST HAVE mentality people developed over the things.

[andrewducker]

A lot of people at work were of the "Well, I'd never buy a tablet normally. But for £90, how bad can it be?" mentality.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

From what I've read about what you can actually do with the HP touchpad, I think the answer to that question is probably 'still quite bad'. Reading email and surfing the internet seems about it.

Only apple could invent a laptop without a keyboard and convince people its a must have item. :)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Also: Apple are not afraid to use their $70Bn cash pile to place gigantic advance orders -- a petabyte of memory here, ten million displays there -- that seriously distort the global market for specific component types.

Apple gets a huge ROI from this because the economies of scale drive down the BOM for their products, thereby increasing their profit per unit sold, while simultaneously shafting their rivals by giving them supply chain headaches.

And then we get fun like this (TL;DR is: essay explaining why nobody in the PC biz seems to be able to produce a laptop as good as the Macbook Air, even with Intel bending over backwards to help).

[andrewducker]

Yup. Laptop makers just don't seem to have been willing to break out ultralaptops into their own category to the point of making them as good as the Air. It really shouldn't be that hard.

And I do get fed up with PC sites that feed you a load of rubbish as the starting point. There must be a better way of matching up the various things that consumers want. I should be able to pick a monitor size, be told what baseline battery life is, and then watch it go down as I choose more powerful components for it (for instance), but that's not something they're set up to do.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

now here's something I find *fascinating*

Apple were prescient enough to know that every PC manufacturer out there would try to build something that looked like an iPad, and made it virtually impossible for them to do so.

The clever thing for other manufacturers to then do is.... build products that DON'T look [or function?] like an iPad. As in, design their own.

they didn't. They floated - as Apple knew they would - inferior and more expensive products, bitching like hellfire that Apple has the market sown up and is using patents against them.

see also Air.

Well played, Tim Cook.

[NB: I do not own an iPad or an Air, and don't like the physical design of the iPhone 4. Currently I am mostly using an '05 laptop loaded with ubuntu]

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I read an article on this very affect recently, I think linked by daring fireball.

having only attempted to buy a non-Apple machine once [my ex-wife's desktop] it kinda surprises me that web portals use language that uselessly vague. It's fortunate that I was aiming for low end, cost-effective, or I'd have had no clue what to buy. I fairly quickly ordered an Inspirion 530 with 20" monitor. I think.

[andrewducker]

They have two choices: vague language (that's useless for techies) or specific language (useless for the mass market). Guess which one works better for them :->

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

the iPad is a curiosity. I don't know of anyone who bought one with a specific need or purpose in mind, but everyone I know that has one uses it constantly - more so than they'd normally use a laptop or desktop.

having not used one, I can only assume I'd find uses for it in much the same way as my iPhone [crappy old 3G, now barely functioning] is an absolutely integral part of my existence.

The HP touchpad is a damned shame. I really hoped it'd succeed as originally intended, but the company is now led by a man who has no interest in it whatsoever.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

except that it doesn't. PC sales are shit, and proliferation of technologies makes it insanely difficult to choose without a lot of guidance.

between vague language and specific language is *clear* language. The cluttered market-speak offered by many retailers means nothing to anyone, other than marketers. This is in much the same way as manager-speak serves only to make people think they're being clever when they actually sound utterly retarded.

Say, for example, I want to buy a graphics card. What I want to know is, is this designed for 3D design or gaming. It can be good at either, but what *specifically* is it intended for.

If I look at a site that says 'good mid-range performance at a reasonable price' I will not buy. If it says 'Optimised for 3D modelling, suitable for most games' or 'Perfect for online gaming', I know exactly where I am and will buy accordingly.

fragmentation of expectation is killing the traditional pc industry.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think it is similar to the netbook phenomenon. There's a significant market for people who want something cheap and cheerful that can lie around on the coffee table, be slung across the room frisbee style and you don't care if it breaks all that much because it's cheap. I know I still get great use from my 701 eeepc (which by any standard is now crap... tiny screen, tiny battery life, no processing power and 3-4 years of wear means the screen is scratched and the mouse buttons take effort) because it's a nicer browser than the phone and you can lie on the couch and look things up without the effort of hauling out a laptop or going to a desktop machine.

A price point of £200 or less will get a lot of people buying these but the catch is that every household needs only one and it won't need upgrading in an age.

That is, of course, completely a guess.

[andrewducker]

All graphics cards are for gaming. That's what they do. I don't think there have been ones for 3D design for about a decade now.

And the PC market is up 3.8% this year, was up 13.8% in 2010, and up about 2% in 2009. Hardly "shit", particularly in the middle of a depression.

[andrewducker]

I tend to agree. Tablets look well optimised for being that kind of device, and for media consumption, and doing tiny amounts of updating, they look very good.

But having used the soft keyboards a bit, I couldn't do without my laptop for anything sizeable.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Tablets look like ideal book readers to me (if done right). They really wouldn't have to do much more than that (i.e. email, web pages) fo rme to get one, Of course the non-DRM e-bok market would have to improve significantly - or maybe I'd need the the subscription service we were talking about last week. Just make them fast enough for my 150 pages/hour reading speed and please god, give the option to tap/click to turn a page, "fling" is too damned slow and awkward....

[andrewducker]

Have you tried one of the newer Kindles? The page-turn speed is now pretty good.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely correct. However ...

I recently bought a Viliv N5 -- Korean palmtop PC. It's superbly made (Apple-class design and finish) and far more useful than a regular netbook -- which is, after all, an anaemic PC laptop: this is a netbook the size of a Psion 5 palmtop, which puts it in a pretty unique part of the map.[*]

And you know what? Viliv went into liquidation a month or so ago. It seems everybody wanted tablets to the exclusion of them being able to market something genuinely different.

Let's also remember that the Windows Tablet PC spec was on sale and available since about 2003; the UMPC standard since 06 or 07 ... what Apple did with the iPad was not to produce the first tablet PC, but to produce the first one that had a critical mass of software tailored to match the user interface available at launch (via iPhone emulation).

(N5's are currently going on eBay for around 50% more than they used to cost when they were in production.)

[*] Currently runs win7, but sooner or later I'm going to get Ubuntu up on it ...

[andrewducker]

Yes - I played with a Windows tablet a few times, but its problem was that it was fairly unusable without the keyboard accessible. Almost none of the software on it used the stylus, and frankly the tablet bit was just a gimmick.

It's possible that Windows 8 will change this, but I'm not betting on it.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

As an iPad owner ...

The iPad is like a Mac in 1985.

Lots of people point to it and say "it's a toy". And they're absolutely right, from the angle they're looking at it: the software ecosystem is immature, it's very restricted in what you can do with it, and there's "computer stuff" missing from it (by design, like the arrow keys that didn't appear on the Mac 128K keyboard).

At the same time, it's like a having Mac in 1985. Today, all personal computers use a UI descended from that 1985 Mac. (Windows started out as just such a UI clone.) It feels like holding a chunk of the future. And, for all that it's limited, you can do a surprising amount of stuff with it.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

"All graphics cards are for gaming."

Hmmm.

In my view, a graphics card suitable for gaming would be one capable of playing the latest games at the resolution of a pretty typical modern monitor with a minimum frame rate of say 30 frames per second and an average frame rate of closer to 60 fps.

A typical resolution for a modern monitor would be 1920x1080. At this resolution, a brand new GeForce GT430 costing £60 will give you average frame rates of 10 frames per second in two year old games like Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead. That's completely unplayable.

This sort of confused marketplace isn't a problem for someone like me who builds his own PCs, subscribes to magazines like Custom PC and knows the best websites to go to for benchmarks. For the average mainstream consumer who goes into PC World to buy a gaming PC, it's a nightmare.

PC World will sell the latest PC games, but either very few or none of their PCs on sale in store will have suitable specs to play them as they should be played. And PC World doesn't even sell high-end graphics cards any more. They will display shelves of pretty-looking laptops and the tiny specs sheet might say (if you're lucky) that this machine has a dedicated graphics chipset, but it won't say what it is. I suspect most people who buy a PC in PC World buy it because looked nice in the shop. Then they get it home, find that actually it doesn't run Battlefield 2: Bad Company at more than 5 frames per second, give up and buy an XBox360 instead.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

We use a Galaxy 10.1 all the time, as a kitchen-table browser and as a way of passing a bit of Internet from person to person.

I won't write more than the shortest of mails on it, but as a portable browser & photo album for social situations it is wonderful.

That is a niche that a laptop fits so badly that I had never realised there was even a niche there until the thing turned up, and then it was the obvious use for it.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The really amazing thing about ipads isn't the technology inside it. It's not the design. It's not the AMAZING THINGS THAT YOU CAN ONLY DO ON AN IPAD (note: most of these things can be done without an ipad) as the newspapers keep trumpeting in frankly embarassing shill stories.

It's that it is a fashionable computer.

Mobile phones are, in many ways, fashion accessories. They're certainly a status marker, and probably since the Razr, there've definitely been fashionable and unfashionable phones. Sony Ericsson particularly spend a fair amount of time making phones that look interesting. And that matters to a lot of people.

Outside of LAN parties where having glowing peripherals and cases is cool (relatively speaking), desktop computers and laptops aren't exactly a fashion item. Even iMacs aren't, really. They might have a lot of money and time undoubtedly lavished on the design, but they didn't become a hip item to be seen with.

iPads, on the other hand, are a computer that you can be seen with. Less bulky than a laptop, and easy to show off or for people to surreptitiously check out, as with a mobile phone. They don't really need to do anything useful. They don't really need to be good at what they do. Once you get past sentiments along the lines of "this is tech that will be good in a while" and "OMG apps!", it's technology that lets you do the same things that you could already but in a more stylish way. It doesn't just appeal to nerds who want the latest gadget or the most efficient computing option. Also, and this is even more clever, unlike an ipod, everyone can see you using it (so it doesn't need the early distinguishing feature of white earphone leads to show that it's an iphone in your pocket, not a different brand).

This, in my opinion, is where Apple struck gold.

That's the amazing thing about iPads.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I'll put my hand up and say that I bought an iPad with a specific purpose in mind. Conversely, I don't use it as much as I use my main desktop PC. (And I'm writing this comment on my laptop.)

I am by no means a dedicated Apple fan. I do have a couple of iPods, but I couldn't envisage buying a Mac. (So it's like a PC and with a nicer case, but you have to use emulators to run much of the software I'd want to run and you pay roughly double what you'd pay for a similarly specced PC...?) The Macbook Pros are nice - just really expensive. Mind you, I really don't get the Macbook Air - fundamentally, nobody has ever explained to me why "being thin" is in any way better than "being not thin" in the context of laptops.

However, I do have specific purpose in mind for a tablet - as a dedicated .pdf reader to help with writing role-playing scenarios. I tend to do this sat on the sofa with a spiral bound notebook and printouts of the scenario I am adapting. I now have my iPad immediately to hand doing things like displaying the dungeon map. I also have a very large part of my RPG collection in .pdf format on the iPad. It's very convenient to be able to quickly look up something. And the iPad screen is perfect for displaying colour .pdfs.

[andrewducker]

If I wanted something dedicated to playing the latest games, and I wasn't me, then going to Dell shows a category for Gaming, PC Specialist have a Gaming PC, Acer have "the really colourful ones clearly aimed at games players".

PC World aren't really aimed at that market. If you want cheap gaming then a Console really is the answer. A PC gaming rig will cost a fair chunk more.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I agree - PC World clearly aren't aimed at that market. But they should be.

When it comes to PCs, they only seem to sell mass market, lowest common denominator stuff. But they also sell high end super-expensive Macs* - so there is clearly a market at PC World for more expensive personal computers that offer something more than a Packard Bell with integrated graphics and a last-generation budget CPU. Computers with nice shiny aluminium cases would be one high end market. Computers capable of playing the latest games - games that are on sale in the same shop - should be another high end market.



* In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the fastest Windows PC available in PC World was actually a Mac running Boot Camp.