“I have been speaking with various tablet vendors lately and more than once, the topic of Apple ‘iPodding’ the industry has come up,” Tim Bajarin writes for PC Magazine.
“iPodding basically refers to the fact that although Apple has been selling the iPod for more than 10 years now, it still owns more than 75 percent of the portable digital music player market,” Bajarin writes. “This fact is giving many of the tablet vendors nightmares. Although they believe there is room for multiple entries given the potential market size and worldwide demand, they recognize that Apple has effectively cornered the music player market and fear that it could do the same with tablets… They know that the secret to Apple success has been its ability to build its hardware and software around an integrated eco-system. This powerful platform is where competitors confidence level lags and the ‘iPodding’ fears raise its head. And to be honest, this should concern them.”
Bajarin writes, “At the moment, I don’t see anybody creating a unified and powerful enough platform that comes close to what Apple already has in the market. That is why Apple is cornering the market in mobile devices today and why it could continue to grow its user base worldwide at the expense of its competitors. Unless something changes dramatically in the Android and Windows camps to bring about a seriously cohesive platform, Apple could potentially ‘iPod’ the tablet market given its initial iPad momentum and the mature platform.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve written before, as recently as this past Saturday:
Apple continues to dominate in not just profit share, but also market share in the portable media player market… As with iPods, there are no third-parties (carriers) inextricably tied to tablets. The carriers are not the primary means for selling tablets as they are for smartphones. Therefore there is no one to foist pretend iPads into the hands of the ignoranti they way carriers currently do with Android phones and soon will do with Windows Phones. The iPad market is just that: The iPad market, not the tablet market. The iPad is much more like the iPod than iPhone.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]