“Several brand vendors including Samsung Electronics and Acer have released 8-inch tablets in light of the good sales performance for the 7.9-inch iPad mini and in order to avoid intense price competition with 7-inch models,” Max Wang and Joseph Tsai report for DigiTimes.
“However, the vendors’ component orders for their 8-inch tablets have recently started dropping as the devices’ sales are falling short of original expectations, according to Taiwan-based component makers,” Wang and Tsai report. “The vendors originally expected 8-inch tablets to be able to gradually replace 7-inch models and become the new mainstream tablet size in the market. But demand has turned out to be weak.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s only one real iPad mini.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bill” for the heads up.]
“in order to avoid intense price competition” Sorry, that’s the main reason for your market share. You think you’re winning at checkers while the actual game is chess and Apple is the master.
There shouldn’t BE any expectations.
Smash the crumbling competition!
Most fandroids are very funny, 50 percent buy android products because they don;t see any difference between the crappy copy and the real thing, they think a Rolls Royce is the same as a yugo because they both have 4 wells.
The other 50% are very irrational in their expectation, they Want a phone with a screen with the size of a tablet and also want a Tablet with a screen size of a phone.
The tablet market is a trap for the unwary. It costs a lot to develop a tablet, so you need to make sure that you get that money back, or else you end up writing off huge sums of money like Microsoft have done. There’s no point in trying unless you have a compelling product with a unique selling point and a business plan that’s realistic. Me too won’t do.
The problem is that the iPad and iPad mini set a very high standard and although not cheap, offer excellent value for money. At the other end of the market are tablets that are either being sold at cost, with the hope of recouping profits by selling content, or alternatively tablets that have failed in the market and are now being sold at fire sale prices which are below cost price. You can’t compete with those prices if you need to make a profit.
Nobody has a realistic chance of matching the iPad quality, so the only option is to sell for less than an iPad, but how do you then differentiate your product from the bottom end tablets and still make a profit ?
It’s hard to identify a sweet spot pricing wise. My guess is that the only way a company might succeed is to sell something that’s entirely different to an iPad because they won’t be able to compete with an iPad on quality, price, ecosystem, performance or profit margin.
there is no gap for them to fill in
Well the only proper reaction to this is for Apple’s stock to go down.
Come to think of it, the only proper reaction to anything at all is for Apple’s stock to go down.
If expectation is crap tablets, how do they “fall short” of that?
😳