Gobry writes, “The first obvious issue is fragmentation… But the bigger issue is one that’s often overlooked: economies of scale. The reason [would-be competitors are] not (just) because they believe 7-inch is a better customer experience. It’s because they can’t make tablets the size of the iPad that are price competitive.”
“Right now, only Apple has the scale and pull with suppliers to build a tablet the size of the iPad and sell it for prices starting at $500,” Gobry writes. “That’s a huge differentiator in a market that is sure to be crowded by this time next year. If Apple starts to make a 7-inch iPad, it means it has to build less, higher margin 9.7-inch iPads, lose some great market differentiation, and take a hit on its new blockbuster product — all of it to go chase Samsung and RIM in a lower margin market? We can hear Steve Jobs chortling from here.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple CEO Steve Jobs said it all on October 18, 2010:
One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.
If you take an iPad an hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the ipad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.
Apple has done extensive user testing on tough interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.
Every tablet user is also a smartphone user. No tablet can compete with the mobility of a smartphone; its ease of fitting into your pocket or purse, its unobtrusiveness when used in a crowd. Given that all tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pocket, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in their pockets is clearly the wrong tradeoff.
The 7-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.
Our potential competitors are having a tough time coming close to iPad’s pricing, even with their far smaller, far less expensive screens. The iPad incorporates everything we’ve learned about building high value products from iPhone, iPods, and Macs. We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything. And this results in an incredible product at a great price. The proof of this will be in the pricing of our competitors’ products which will likely offer less for more.
These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA. Dead On Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product.
Sounds like lots of fun ahead.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]
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