“In a triumph of madness over common sense, HP says it will manufacture one more batch of its loss-making TouchPad tablet ‘to meet unfulfilled demand,’ but won’t say how many or when they will ship: no great surprise when you think about just how much cash HP has already lost competing with Apple and its iPad juggernaut,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“If Apple’s sobbing non-iPad tablet-making competitors thought things were bad already, HP’s low-cost giveaway move made things worse. There must be hundreds of thousands of unwanted tablets from sundry manufacturers filling up the distribution chain, making a holiday season price war inevitable,” Evans writes. “In other words, HP’s decision to sell its tablets at a loss will eventually be emulated by all Apple’s other competitors.”
Evans writes, “You’ll see tablet makers struggling madly to sell devices at price points which only barely cover their costs. If pressed, Apple has the nuclear option of dropping iPad prices in order to further starve the market. Amazon will be seizing as much oxygen as it can, shunting devices from other makers and OS developers to the sidelines. The end result will be that after a disappointing Christmas quarter executives in boardrooms outside of HP will also be asking if it is worth losing money in a market Apple owns. And Apple will be planning to raise its game again with the introduction of the iPad 3.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “King Mel” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Why the undead $99 TouchPad might portend iPad’s doom – August 31, 2011
HP to produce one final run of TouchPads to meet ‘unfulfilled demand’ – August 30, 2011