“The new iPad model hitting stores Friday comes with several improvements over the original version but the same price tag, hobbling efforts by rivals at breaking Apple Inc.’s hold on the emerging market for tablet computers,” Peter Svensson reports for The Associated Press.
“Competitors such as Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. can’t seem to match the iPad’s starting price of $499. Tablets that are comparable to the iPad in features cost hundreds of dollars more, while cheaper tablets are inferior to the iPad in quality,” Svensson reports. “It’s rare for prices to start low and stay low, yet it looks as if that’s exactly what Apple intended. Apple appears to have chosen, right from the start, to make less of a profit from its iPads than it does from iPods and iPhones. Apple is telling investors to expect overall margins to keep declining, meaning competitors can’t expect much of a reprieve.”
Svensson reports, “Rivals generally use Google Inc.’s Android system, which Lam says demands more memory, raising the cost of the product. Apple’s iPad software isn’t as ambitious about ‘multitasking,’ or the ability to run more than one application at the same time, so it doesn’t need as much memory”
MacDailyNews Note: iPad multi-tasks intelligently, with regard for the user and, importantly, their device’s battery (se also: Adobe’s antiquated Flash or lack thereof). All iPads can run more than on application at a time.
Svensson continues, “In short, using Android forces iPad competitors to produce more expensive machines, Wayne Lam at research firm IHS iSuppli said. They might be able to bring component costs down by working closely with Google to optimize the software, but meeting the needs of a range of devices and companies is difficult. Because Apple controls its own software, it’s a better position to tailor it to its own devices. That adds up to very difficult math for competitors.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]