“Apple Inc’s newest iPad was looking like another hot seller on Friday, with hundreds queueing at stores across Asia and Europe to get their hands on a gadget likely to dominate the tablet-computer market well into next year,” Pauline Askin and Ethan Bilby report for Reuters.
“The new iPad – Apple has refrained from calling it iPad 3 – has faster chips, fourth-generation wireless, a crisper display and a better camera, making it harder for competitors like Samsung’s Galaxy, which also lack Apple’s range of apps and content, to catch up,” Askin and Bilby report. “On price, too, Apple’s rivals will struggle to beat it. The new iPad starts at $499 in the United States, 479 euros in Germany and 42,800 yen in Japan. Only Amazon’s far more basic Kindle Fire is significantly cheaper.”
MacDailyNews Take: Amazon’s tiny screen Kindle Fire is a device designed for buying things from Amazon. It is nothing like the iPad. It’s barely a “tablet” and a joke in comparison to any iPad, regardless of version.
Askin and Bilby report, “Apple will continue to sell the iPad 2 but has dropped its price by $100 to start at $399.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Wasn’t Apple’s tablet market dominance “cemented” long ago?
As MDN likes to say, ‘There is no ‘tablet market’, only an ‘iPad market’.’ All other tablet makers are ‘Apple wannabes’ trying to glom on to the iPad’s buzz / popularity.
Anyone that tries to say differently is either an ‘Apple hater’ or an ‘iPad denyer’. Or both.
I preordered one to give as a gift in early April. I can hardly keep myself from tearing it open!
I don’t like the Amazon tablets, they feel cheap in hand. But the Fire isn’t just an amazon tablet. You can easily load another ROM onto it and run Android on it and then it is a threat.
If you need to “load another ROM onto it,” it’s NOT a threat. For 99% of consumers, that’s not done “easily.” Did you already know that and just want someone to stroke your ego by pointing it out, or are you really that out of touch?
“you can easily load another ROM onto it”
Utter bullshit. Only the geekiest of neck bearded nerds will do this leaving out 99.8% of consumers who don’t even know what a ROM is, let alone how to load one.
The era of needing a degree in programming to use personal computing devices is dead. We are now in the era of simplicity ease of use and “the rest of us”.
iPad has no rivals and it *is* the tablet “market”.
Can this F. reporter and reviewer stop calling the iPad a tablet, first of all is not a TABLET, is an iPad. Second of all, what tablet market?
i Didn’t know was an tablet market. lol.
Sure there’s a tablet market. Just looking around the office here: enteric aspirin, ibuprophen, vitamin b complex.
Regarding the new iPad… on the FedEx truck for delivery today.
Yet the Android Storm Troopers keep bragging about their market share winning. The intelligence level from these guys are embarrassing. Give something away for free, or buy one get one free or sell it at a lost will gain you huge marketshare.
I was standing in line the other day to get the latest Kindle and it struck me that there was no one in front of me and no one behind. There was a line at the pay toilet down the hall though. Seriously, has anyone even seen a line form for the lates knockoff? That should say something.
Then what did you do when you came out of your power-nap? Move ahead in line? Shake your head and go home to pre-order an iPad?
Samsung probably will come out with a tablet ad now showing people queuing up to buy an iPad & then shown a galaxy tab & then start dancing & exclaiming “freedom” & a parade will appear with everyone else dancing & exclaiming “freedom”…
I feel nausea everytime I came across that galaxy s ad…
Apple already had it “cemented.” Every tablet that tried to compete head-to-head with iPad and iPad 2 failed and lost money. Kindle Fire intentionally avoids direct competition with iPad, and it loses money per sale “by design.”
The new iPad must be demoralizing to Microsoft’s Windows 8 team. Who’s going to want a tablet with Windows 8 now, or six months from now, or whenever it gets released? Apple timing is perfect. It’s like 2010, when Apple released the original iPad and took all the media attention and hype away from Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 release a few months later. And it’s not only iPad, because Apple is releasing Mountain Lion this summer to cover the “desktop” front. Windows 8 will just go “thud” and no one will care.
Don’t forget, Microsoft has a secret weapon: Office. The productivity suite has monumental adoption rates not only in business but at the consumer level. Even if Windows suffers market share losses, Office will be there for Steve Ballmer and his cronies, a cash cow that keeps on fattening their wallets across OS platforms. Like Krupp in Germany, they can continue to thrive though the glorious war for nationalism fail.
(Godwin’s Law invoked in 3…2…1…)
iPad has had no problem with large-scale adoption in the business world. It has no Office.
And once Windows 8 stagnates as a tablet OS, Microsoft will probably create “Office of iOS.” It probably already exists, in secret. But MS wants Windows 8 (on tablets) to have that “advantage” you describe when it launches.
I walked into a London Drug Store and bought a new one this morning.
The London Drug Store chain has carried Apple products in Western Canada since the late 90s. There were 3 in the lineup 10 minutes before it opened. I got the 4th of the five 4G 64 GB they had in stock. I was there a total of 20 minutes.
Pad HD indeed.
I love London Drug Stores. Every time I’m visiting my sister I shop there for everything—aspirin, leggings, Player’s Navy Cut (although I quit eight years ago).