Here’s a thought exercise for you. See if you can guess which part of this headline the Macalope thinks is right and which part he thinks is a slow, leisurely drive through downtown Cuckoo Bananaville, population TechnoBuffalo’s Justin Herrick.
“Amazon effectively killed Android tablets, and the iPad’s next.” (Tip o’ the antlers to mylestaylor.)
The Macalope didn’t say it was going to be a very strenuous exercise.
Herrick does the math and realizes that if A equals B… then C! With jelly on it!
The online retailer, according to IDG, experienced a 38% increase in tablet shipments last year compared to 2016.
That is a very impressive increase. iPad sales only inched up 3 percent. Turns out shipping Fire tablets at prices that are so low you can almost tile your bathroom with them affordably will actually move units. Who knew? Other than all of history.
The tablet market’s future is looking bright for Amazon and, well, nobody else.
Amazon is shipping these at or close to cost, so it’s only “bright” inasmuch as these devices prompt people to buy stuff on Amazon and, most importantly, subscribe to Amazon Prime. Amazon isn’t trying to compete in the tablet market, it’s trying to compete in the online retail and subscription market.
But the people who buy cheap Fire tablets are probably not in the market for an iPad anyway.
Funny little note about Google in this piece:
…Google shows no significant effort to advance the experience on tablets. Since Android 3.0 Honeycomb was launched in 2011, Google’s released only four tablets. None of them ever came close to rivaling the iPad.
Weird how you don’t see any “GOOGLE FAILING TO COMPETE IN TABLET MARKET” articles.
The Fire tablets know no boundaries.
Other than quality. And productivity. Other than those, no boundaries. Just those two. That don’t get much mention in this piece other than this:
You know what you’re getting with a Fire tablet, and that’s why no one cares about the plastic builds.
You chose to vacation in New Jersey. You knew what you were getting into.
Apparently, this expectation game only works one way. When you pay a little, you expect to get plastic crap. When you get excellent build quality, you are shocked to find out it was more expensive.
Apple cashed in nicely, but consumers don’t seem to want to spend a ton of money on a phone and a tablet.
Only 13.2 million consumers last quarter wanted to get an iPad! Which, okay, is 70 percent more than bought a Kindle Fire tablet. But, still.
Amazon shouldn’t plan on going after Apple next. It simply doesn’t need to.
It also really can’t. People are buying Fire tablets as cheap entertainment devices. People are buying iPads for entertainment and for getting stuff done.
The bells and whistles of an iPad aren’t present, but the Fire tablets do the same exact things.
If Apple would only remove the church bell and slide whistle features, then they’d get the price of an iPad down to the Fire tablet’s range because that’s all that’s apparently differentiating the two.
Just like home speaker systems, Amazon and Apple aren’t playing the same game, each is playing to its own strengths. And that’s okay.