“Holiday sales of tablets may sort out the winners from the losers in a technology sector inundated with ambitious hardware and software rollouts,” Antoine Gara reports for TheStreet. “The savvy among us probably have already aligned ourselves with chosen devices and operating systems, so I decided to canvass the market for tablets and e-readers with a swing voter this holiday season: my mother.”
“After a Sunday spent shopping in New York City, here are three insights on the device market with three weeks left in the holiday season,” Gara reports. “While Apple certainly is facing the stiffest competition yet in competing hardware, software and content stores offered by Google, Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, there seems little reason for Tim Cook and Co. to sweat it out this holiday season.”
Gara reports, “My mother went into our tech-product tour wanting either an iPad or iPad Mini, and she emerged from a whirlwind presentation of alternatives still wanting an Apple tablet.”
Read more in the full article here.
Yeah, and when I’m considering what tablet to buy, I always consider advice from my Mom.
Though, as a good son, I don’t mind holding a spot for her in line.
Mom’s and the remaining 99.9% of the planet aren’t geeks so they buy what suits them best. Clearly, that is Apple.
I wish that were true but the vast majority are bottom feeders who will pick up an Android piece of junk and hope it is ‘the same as Apple’.
And these findings are a suprise? Not only a suprise but TOTALY IGNORED BY WALL STREET? AAPL is DOOMED!!! Anal iZe this .|. Naysayers!
The more options there are, the more evident it is that Apple stands alone and everyone else is lumped together with little to no differentiation. In this way, all these new “competitors” are actually beneficial to Apple’s brand and unique offerings.
Sure, and Apple’s like a swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, backed against the galleon bulkhead, one arm protecting the innocent maiden, the other wielding a glistening cutlass, slashing away at a shipload of multinational pirates. A fair fight, for all that.
Douglas Fairbanks was one hell of a swashbuckling Robin Hood as well. Just ask Maid Marrion.
Choosy Moms don’t choose Jeff (Bezos). Or Schmidt/Page/Shamsteal for that matter. This brings out a very salient point that alternatives to Apple are really mostly attractive to the geeks only. Most “real” people don’t want a potential headache but something they can trust and know they’re getting a world class product.
Actually, her choice was less objective than you might think: she already owns an iPhone AND a MacBook, so the likelihood of her switching to anything else was pretty small to begin with.
It would be far more interesting (vis a vis whether or not Apple is really threatened by Google, Amazon, and/or Micro$oft) to have followed a more OS agnostic person around. I don’t think that this person’s experience is representative of anything other than a loyal Apple user (of which I, of course, am also one)…
OS agnostic? Windows OS users prefer iPads. Mac OS users prefer iPads. Chrome OS users prefer Android Tablets.
If anyone doesn’t use one of those 3 OSes they will pick an iPad because it’s easier to use.
OS Agnostic, what bullshit.
DUH!!!
Save your time and don’t bother reading this fluff piece.
Gara is trying to be kind to the others, but the obvious conclusion to the article is what you know the obvious conclusion should be.
She went with Apple.
Like 99% of people who want to blow their nose and ask for a Kleenex… 99% of people looking for a tablet ask for an iPad … It’s reputation precedes it thanks to its huge market share and the lead is going to prove to big to overcome…. This game is over in the publics mind… Only the incredibly uniformed consider anything other than the iPad form….