I was reading Nelson Chan’s post about the HP Slate 500 that was released in late October and how it compares with the iPad. In his post, he pointed out that the HP Slate 500 should be, according to the specifications, superior to the iPad, and yet it is doomed to fail in comparison to Apple’s infinitely more successful iPad. He states that this is because of the affective attitude towards Apple as well as the HP Slate’s target market.
I, on the other hand, believe otherwise. First off, the HP Slate was fairly successful as it was sold-out early on. It was barely a nuisance to the iPad’s reign at the top. However, I believe the reasons for HP’s insignificant share in the market originate from much more than just the success Apple faces. For one, Apple’s brand isn’t the only factor. Though Apple products have sort of earned recognition for quality (despite the fact that the iPad is more fragile than any other tablet on the market and severely prone to damages), HP is on the opposite site of the spectrum. HP’s computers and laptops are notorious for breaking down among anyone who is tech savvy. Oddly I think this is a real reason for failure. Though HP is marketing the Slate as a business solution, it’s more profitable consumers is likely anyone tech savvy. This is because the iPad is underpowered and more or less designed to be sleek rather than usable. For those in sync with technology, the iPad is often seen as too weak or restrictive, thus opening a fairly large market for Apple “haters”. Unfortunately for HP, these same users are the ones that know of HP’s terrible track record. Now pair this up with the fact that the price is on par with the expensive Apple iPad, and share a similar amount of power, the HP Slate is facing problems on several of the 4 P’s already.
What about other tablets? Personally I think it is only a matter of time before Apple dies slowly. With every company in the industry aiming to create iPad or iPod killers, the quality of the competing products are steadily going up, while Apple is slowly running out of innovations. The decline of Apple’s innovation is obviously demonstrated by the iPad, which re-uses so many aspects of the iPod Touch and iPhone that earned it so many nicknames over the internet. Every PC maker in the industry is probably trying to create their own tablets now. Personally I have hopes for two particular products. The first is just the tablet netbooks, first seen by Asus in the T91, these devices are just a tad thicker than the iPad, and are fully functional netbooks that have a reversible, collapsible screen. The other is the market for Android tablets and their interface is similarly sleek.
Is Apple running on borrowed time? I know I am hardly the only person who thinks Apple will slowly die down, and many on the internet think that Apple is just running on brand recognition at this point. iPod’s have been successful for several years now, let’s just go get another one, let’s get their tablet and so on. While there is certainly some truth to that, as there are people who’d die before they buy an operating system from Microsoft at this point, I think there’s also the fact that community is becoming an important aspect in selling the product. I wrote earlier on about games that have multiplayer as a main selling point, and without a community, it’d be dead. Similarly I think Apple’s success is from the AppStore. There is such a gigantic library on the AppStore that it’ll take a competitors years to catch up. It’s slowly becoming a part of their product, something we don’t really recognize, but definitely adds value to the product.
