Google arrogantly thought it could walk in and take that away but it fell on its face and is now limping away.
"Google is backing out of tablets. It’s not leaving money on the table. There is no money on the table. "
That's because Google, like MS, has moved on to 2-in-1s. In that world, there is no room for a dedicated tablet. This is an interesting article on the state of the African / Middle Easter markets:
"Yet in the Middle East and African markets, the tide is turning away from tablets and back to PC's and 2-in-1 devices. And while the iPad Pro is considered a detachable device or a 2-in-1 device, Apple is simply not faring well in that particular market."
Whether, over time, that translates to other markets, who knows. iPad sales did see an uptick with the introduction of the $329 iPad and iPad Pro models but growth has leveled off.
Microsoft is not making significant money from all of its Surface operations: barely $1 billion in revenue per quarter since it started, and its profits are quite thin because it spends so much money servicing failed hardware.
When you say that detachables are where it's at, and iPads are leveling off, you also have to qualify those generalizations: Apple is the largest maker of tablets+detachables+slates globally, by a huge margin. Almost 2x the second place Samsung. Microsoft Surface isn't even in the top 5.
Nobody else shipping any volumes of devices is making any money. That's because #2 and #3 are Samsung and Amazon, which are dumping low-cost devices in the market, making it very hard for anyone else to compete with a profitable product, outside of the leader, iPad.
It's just bizarre that the media narrative keeps saying that success is failure and that various petty marginal busywork from companies that haven't made any money in the space after years of trying is all incredible work and has untapped, unlimited potential. That's all total bullshit.
"Microsoft is not making significant money from all of its Surface operations: barely $1 billion in revenue per quarter since it started,"
This is true but in the overall Windows ecosystem, MS' Surface isn't the only player. There's HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, all who have gotten much better at making good hardware.
As for what they were ''supposed" to achieve with each idea/project, it's moot as long as Google has its services running on most of the devices out there. In that sense, mission accomplished and if iPad sales are largely flat, it can definitely be put down to Android dominance from Google. As can the presence of a so called 'low cost' iPad in Apple's lineup.
My, how he tries. So precious.
Cognitive dissonance is real.
I linked to iPad marketshare over the last few years showing decline then flattening out.
I don't have to try. The reality is there staring straight at you. Of course, if you think Android tablets had nothing to do with all this I'm willing to hear you out.
But please don't fire back with "but the money goes to Apple". That is irrelevant when tablets like Amazon's offerings aren't even brought to market with high margins in the first place. Have you ever wondered why?Although that doesn't mean other Android tablets don't make money. They do.
Glad somebody gets this. Amazon tablets are extremely successful for the company, despite the low margins....because their whole point is different than the point of an iPad. Actually "points," because there are multiple goals for the Fire tablets: 1) Fire tablet owners are more likely to become and stay Prime members and to shop on Amazon. 2) Fire tablets are one of several avenues to lock people into the ever-more-profitable Alexa eco-system. 3) Fire tablets provide Amazon a research tool to discover what video content their customers like. 4) Their tablets are one of the key ways to distribute audio books to customers (Even Google admits that audio books are a burgeoning field).
There's an iPad market and then there is everybody else making Android OS tablets. There are no Android OS tablets in anyway comparable to the iPad Pro's for hardware or ecosystem. That's the reality.
Cool beans about Roku;
"Roku states its average revenue per unit is $11.22, up 35 percent. It reported $199 million in revenue in the six month period ending June 30, 2017, up from the year prior of $162 million. Its annual revenue numbers also increased year-over-year, up from $319 million to $398 million."
That's a wonderful thing, selling low cost streaming devices in volume; see Amazon, Google, and bundled versions in various television. I Hope that Roku's business model beyond the box works out. Maybe they would be better off absorbed by Spotify.
The other 75% is Android and covers all price points. Who makes the most money off each sale is simply irrelevant if your product was never even brought to market with high margins in mind in the first place. Of course that doesn't mean there aren't models that generate decent revenues for manufacturers and every Android tablet sale is a potential sale that didn't go to Apple.
Another guy who thinks profit doesn’t matter, this time to the individual android tablet manufacturers. Cool strategy these CEOs must have — “We aren’t making any money and won’t survive ourselves, but at least it’s not a sale to Apple!”
Hint: it absolutely matters who makes the money. If you’re not making money you can’t innovate, you can only clone. That’s a short term strategy and won’t last. Apple can invent new products and technologies because they can afford to. How? By worrying about actually making a good profit. It’s the air corporations breathe. Without healthy profit they suffocate and die.
You seem to be confused.
"A short term strategy that won't last"?
How do you define 'short term' because Apple has been flat in tablets for a while now, and that in spite of a low cost option coming to market.
"It absolutely matters to make money".
No one questions that, but have you considered that simply making a profit, even if minimal, is what many manufacturers aim for from the outset?
There are Spanish manufacturers that you have never heard of making decent smartphones, ebook readers and tablets that largely go into retail via large resellers sometimes under the brand of the retailer. They have been in business for years. How is that even possible in your 'short term strategy that won't last'?
No doubt there are hundreds and hundreds of similar operations worldwide that don't even register the slightest blip on your radar but when you take the likes of Huawei, Samsung, Lenovo and Amazon out of the Android picture you are still left with something called 'other' and that's where those tiny (and some not so) manufacturers live. And guess what, that 'other' is huge.
Some here just love to tell us all about it when some of those companies go out of business but there is nothing strange about it. Far bigger tech companies have also gone out of business. That's the nature of the beast but 'other' is still there and still huge. Yes, there will be convergence and the big players will get bigger but that is also the nature of the beast. Bigger companies buy smaller (and not so small) companies. For all its efforts, where would Apple be today without certain acquisitions. No need to clone if you can buy the technology outright, right ;-).
You love to tell us that Apple is the biggest company in the world. The company that makes the most profit. In the past I'm sure you also banged the 'Apple is premium drum and didn't need to fish in the murky lower bands' but some companies, like I just mentioned are not in the business to be the biggest. That's not part of the plan and never was.
How things have changed. Even for Apple. They moved back from where they were going on the low cost iPad. Lower tech screen assembly and, shock horror, thicker! Try to imagine the current iPad market situation without that model.
People were telling me the MBA was EoL in 2016. It's still with us in 2018 and there are even rumours of an update. Unthinkable!
People told me there was no need for larger screened iPhones. The Plus models then promptly became mega sellers.
People told me in 2016 that USB-C was the future and that all prior USB would vanish from new future Macs. Then the iMac and iMac Pro proved them wrong.
When I suggested the 'X' name for iPhone and that 'black' should be dumped, some showed scorn.
Incredible how some people can be so sure of themselves to the point of telling others (who are simply offering opinions) they are simply wrong and not see how they themselves are the ones that are later wrong.
We are all 'pundits' to a degree, even those who use the term in a belittling manner to describe others. Everybody has their opinion. Those opinions should at least be respected.
And you will be surprised to learn that the Spanish company I was referring to has not 'cloned' anything. It simply offers half decent products at attractive prices. It is still in business.
Now let's bring the bigger players back into the scheme of things as they also form a large chunk of the Android tablet world too. They have other possible revenue streams that don't necessarily have huge profits from each sale as a goal. Amazon definitely doesn't. Some, like Samsung, sometimes use tablets as part of the deal on other sales (TVs, phones, washing machines etc). Believe me, it's effective. Huawei's tablets get better and better even though they haven't been in the market for long. Hey, for a relative newbie, the MateBook even took on the iPad Pro. Microsoft? Some will snigger at that but if they stay in the market, I doubt they'll get worse. Food for thought.
So with all that happening, the focus is put on Google for dropping tablets? In the bigger scheme of things, how could we put that into perspective? Like when Apple dropped its Airport products? Irrelevant? Insignificant?
One this is for sure, it is simply not a big deal. Not in the slightest.
While I agree with the opening remarks that Android tablets are dead, the reason is that ChromeOS is on the rise, and ChromeOS devices are taking the place of tablets in the Google world with multi-use Chromebooks.
The rest of the article is from another planet. According to this story ChromeOS is dead and Google is no longer supporting it after stopping sales of their Pixel Chromebook? Ah, what about the Pixelbook that was only released a few months ago and then refreshed with more powerful (and costly) models since the beginning of this year, seems like they are continuing to ramp up ChromeOS not abandon it. Have you been in a best buy lately? The Chromebooks they have on display have doubled in the last year. Costco is even selling them.
And I see you neglected to mention the education market where iPad has lost enormous market to ChromeOS. Android P doesn't have anything to do with the death of ChromeOS, if it did you wouldn't have seen so many new Chromebooks on display at CES and Barcelona. And even three new Chrome boxes are awaiting release this year from ASUS, HP and Acer, and CTL just released their new model, the first Chromebox to run Android apps out of the box.
Microsoft was chasing their tail trying to catch Google with Windows S, and now they've decided to change their strategy again as that hasn't worked, abandoning S. The only way Apple will be able to regain some of what it has lost is to start selling products at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, I think their time has come and gone for the masses. J
Android and Windows slates have not failed or died out....They evolved into a couple of things that the public wants. Most people do not want a tablet if we define "tablet" as the form factor invented by Apple in 2009. Tablet sales declined at the same time that Android has led the movement toward larger and larger phones and Windows has led the movement toward 2-in-1 laptop / tablet hybrids. Even though I still have a slate-form tablet, it's the Amazon Fire HD 10, which I use primarily as my gateway into Amazon media, and as a second "Alexa" device. Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use.....And they are examples of 2018's tablets. When you say Apple is leading the tablet market, that's precisely the same as Amazon bragging that they lead the e-reader category--i.e., they are leading in categories that the public generally does not want. And yes, I still use a Kindle e-reader. But that's because I'm one of those weird kinds who uses a device because it does what I want, not because of how popular or unpopular the device is.
Android and Windows slates have not failed or died out....They evolved into a couple of things that the public wants. Most people do not want a tablet if we define "tablet" as the form factor invented by Apple in 2009. Tablet sales declined at the same time that Android has led the movement toward larger and larger phones and Windows has led the movement toward 2-in-1 laptop / tablet hybrids. Even though I still have a slate-form tablet, it's the Amazon Fire HD 10, which I use primarily as my gateway into Amazon media, and as a second "Alexa" device. Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use.....And they are examples of 2018's tablets. When you say Apple is leading the tablet market, that's precisely the same as Amazon bragging that they lead the e-reader category--i.e., they are leading in categories that the public generally does not want. And yes, I still use a Kindle e-reader. But that's because I'm one of those weird kinds who uses a device because it does what I want, not because of how popular or unpopular the device is.
"Tablet sales declined at the same time that Android has led the movement toward larger and larger phones and Windows has led the movement toward 2-in-1 laptop / tablet hybrids." => Agreed.
"Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use" => Over time I think that's the direction the market will evolve: a large-screen smartphone + 2-in-1 or ultrabook.
If that were so, they wouldn’t have invested so much in trying to make a real go at it.
Even publicly advertising that their hardware design is this and that... taking a page from Apple and plastering it everywhere.
It hurts them in the in the public eye and deep in the heart that they cannot sell products to people. No one wants their stuff unless it’s free. They literally have to give themselves away (cue U2 song from iTunes) in order to be accepted. When they charge, they’re left with nothing.
Despite the restructure, google is just an ad company that wastes money on other stuff.
Yes, although it's more than an ad company too. Consumer hardware hasn't been its revenue driver and it is not even remotely part of its core business so you could wrap up each consumer hardware failure and put Christmas lights on them and it still wouldn't mean anything significant. That said, it's still a billion dollar part of the company. That's not a bad way to 'fail'. And in spite of everything the Pixel phones will probably get even better soon.
You recognize the "billion dollar part" that Google hardware is, without even considering the many billions Google has wasted to get there.
Microsoft had billions in revenue from Zune and Surface RT. But when it costs much more to do a project than it returns, it doesn't matter how many zeros are on both sides of the equation. It's still a loss. And that's the definition of a bad way to fail.
Zune got dramatically better over time. It just wasn't good enough to sell in commercially significant volumes. Pixel got massive praise and free advertising, but it wasn't really a very good phone. It's an ugly, rather outdated run-of-the-mill pair of HTC and LG handsets with a Google camera app (which can be sideloaded to other phones, if Google were really free and open and trying to get Android to improve as a loving parent rather than just another greedy capitalist trying to run a business that makes money in the model of Apple).
I linked to iPad marketshare over the last few years showing decline then flattening out.
I don't have to try. The reality is there staring straight at you. Of course, if you think Android tablets had nothing to do with all this I'm willing to hear you out.
But please don't fire back with "but the money goes to Apple". That is irrelevant when tablets like Amazon's offerings aren't even brought to market with high margins in the first place. Have you ever wondered why?Although that doesn't mean other Android tablets don't make money. They do.
I don't think iPad growth flattening out is solely due to Android tablets. Other factors include 1) surging popularity of large-screen smartphones, 2) popularity of thin / light laptops. I actually think Android tablet sales are the least contributing factor.
You are right. iPad sales were down from the 2014 peak of iPad mini sales, but Android tablets fell down even further. There's no credible logic supporting the idea that Apple's addressable market was fleeing to Android.
Demand for iPads were eaten up by larger iPhones, the same way as iPod sales were eaten up by iPhone with an iPod app on it, not by cheap MP3 players. Those competitors fell in concert with iPod sales, just as Android tablets have fallen with iPad (and fallen faster).
If you read the articles, you can see it was clear what was causing iPad sales to go down as it was happening. It just wasn't reported correctly elsewhere, as the headlines reflect. Apple's iPad business didn't collapse, but the rest of the tablet industry did.
Yeah I'd be careful taking your news about how wonderful things are for Apple from "Apple Insider." Here's the other side: "Windows was the only OS tracked by Futuresource to make gains from last quarter to this quarter in the K-12 space in the US. Chrome OS' share was down sequentially (though only slightly) from 59.8 percent in Q3 to 59.6 percent in Q4. Apple iOS' share was down more significantly, to 10.6 percent, and Apple macOS' share to 3.5 percent." http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-pcs-gain-share-in-k-12-in-the-u-s-but-chromebooks-still-dominate/
You replied to a totally phony post. But to your point: Apple is losing share to Chromebooks and Windows netbooks in education. But remember that this is largely because Apple had an unusually high market share in that segment, back when education was considered to be one of the least valuable markets for PCs. Apple's high market share (+50% through its most beleaguered days) was blown off by pundits because "edu didn't matter and was of little value."
Today, Apple is making major inroads into markets it has never materially participated in: enterprise sales, China, Europe and emerging countries are all buying iPads and Macs on a new scale. PC makers are retreating and licking wounds. The entire PC market is shrinking while Apple is growing.
What gets reported? That Google and Microsoft are dumping (zero profit dumping) their OS on education sales of <$200 netbooks on schools, a market segment that never got talked about while Apple owned it.
So yes, Apple's unit market share is going down in U.S. Education. But nobody is entering the market and making money. That's not happening elsewhere. Nobody wants to buy Chromebooks apart from starved US public schools that have been stripped of funding and are now being run as charities, who will take them in exchange for giving up access to student data.
If you think that's a great move by Google hardware, show me the money. It's not there. No PC makers are making any money opposite Google in edu netbooks, just as nobody is making money in tablets on either side. Meanwhile, despite its lower market share, Apple continues to make money in k12, and it owns higher education, where individuals choose what to buy, rather than starved-to-the-bone US k12 school districts who have no choice but to accept virtually free netbooks.
Apple is still making LOTS of money in iPads while it ships about 1-4 of all tablets+detachables+slates globally. Think about that. +$5 billion in the last quarter. Google made nothing.
As this article shows, Google tried for years to make a tablet and then gave up after never making any money or achieving anything apart from failure.
Lots of talk about how Apple TV is being outsold by cheaper devices in terms of units, but Apple hasn't gotten out of the business. Instead, it keeps improving its box. It just released Apple TV 4K.
If Apple had discontinued Apple TV 4 and stopped supporting all of its older models in the next iOS 12, you might have a point. But that's not what's happening. And that's why Google abandoning tablets is news while Roku giving away TV boxes while Apple makes far more money from Apple TV is not really.
Note which story is being falsely covered in sensational clickbait sources that don't know which way the wind blows.
"Google is backing out of tablets. It’s not leaving money on the table. There is no money on the table. "
That's because Google, like MS, has moved on to 2-in-1s. In that world, there is no room for a dedicated tablet. This is an interesting article on the state of the African / Middle Easter markets:
"Yet in the Middle East and African markets, the tide is turning away from tablets and back to PC's and 2-in-1 devices. And while the iPad Pro is considered a detachable device or a 2-in-1 device, Apple is simply not faring well in that particular market."
Whether, over time, that translates to other markets, who knows. iPad sales did see an uptick with the introduction of the $329 iPad and iPad Pro models but growth has leveled off.
False. You can make up new markets, but Google isn't moving on to 2n1s. It announced ChromeOS in 2009, before its Android tablets. It started trying to sell ChromeOS in 2011, the same year it dumped out Honeycomb.
It failed at Chromebooks with third parties and failed at great expense to try selling its own Chromebook Pixel 2013-2017. Pixelbook is commercially irrelevant. Google can't even sell Pixel handsets with rebates, it's not going to be able to ship a $1000 netbook only capable of running a browser.
So to say Google is moving from tablets to netbooks/laptops of some sort is backward. It failed with both in parallel.
Citing some impoverished market and saying its shifting from tablets to "2n1s" is just a reflection of the fact that the cheapest PC-devices are shifting away from one failure to retreat back into the more common PC format. It's not growth. 2n1s are not an expansion of PC sales. PC sales are trending downward overall.
iPad Pro outsold "detachables" as fast as IDC could invent a new PC market to segregate PC into a silo it could talk about without being run over by Apple. The numbers in this article cite tablets+detachables+slates.
As for "Who Knows" - the data is freely available. This is all common knowledge.
Ditto Gator Guy's comments - there are plenty of Android tablets, just not Google tablets.
Apple's main competition in the tablet world is not Google, its Microsoft. Despite recent additions of things like the files app and split screen multitasking, iPads and iOS are not viable laptop replacements. I recently purchased a 12" iPad Pro to replace my aging MacBook Air. It can do a lot of what you want a laptop to do, but many of the workflows are clumsy, awkward and inefficient, and other things just can't be done and I ended up purchasing a MacBook Pro.
I haven't used one more than to play for a few seconds, but the Surface tablets seem to do a better job of being a laptop/tablet hybrid. iPads are awesome, solid devices, but if Apple wants them to truly become productivity devices, they need to step up the development of iOS.
Microsoft certainly isn’t a competitor. Their own tablets are a rounding error, with less than 3.5 milling selling a year. Much too expensive for the Windows crowd.
as for Windows tablets overall, they’re going nowhere. As evidence, we can look to enterprise adoption. That’s where we would expect to see Windows tablets ruling. But in enterprise (large organizations which includes education and government), 91% of tablets are iPads, and 6% are Android, almost all Samsung, and the other 2% is Windows.
Google arrogantly thought it could walk in and take that away but it fell on its face and is now limping away.
"Google is backing out of tablets. It’s not leaving money on the table. There is no money on the table. "
That's because Google, like MS, has moved on to 2-in-1s. In that world, there is no room for a dedicated tablet. This is an interesting article on the state of the African / Middle Easter markets:
"Yet in the Middle East and African markets, the tide is turning away from tablets and back to PC's and 2-in-1 devices. And while the iPad Pro is considered a detachable device or a 2-in-1 device, Apple is simply not faring well in that particular market."
Whether, over time, that translates to other markets, who knows. iPad sales did see an uptick with the introduction of the $329 iPad and iPad Pro models but growth has leveled off.
Microsoft is not making significant money from all of its Surface operations: barely $1 billion in revenue per quarter since it started, and its profits are quite thin because it spends so much money servicing failed hardware.
When you say that detachables are where it's at, and iPads are leveling off, you also have to qualify those generalizations: Apple is the largest maker of tablets+detachables+slates globally, by a huge margin. Almost 2x the second place Samsung. Microsoft Surface isn't even in the top 5.
Nobody else shipping any volumes of devices is making any money. That's because #2 and #3 are Samsung and Amazon, which are dumping low-cost devices in the market, making it very hard for anyone else to compete with a profitable product, outside of the leader, iPad.
It's just bizarre that the media narrative keeps saying that success is failure and that various petty marginal busywork from companies that haven't made any money in the space after years of trying is all incredible work and has untapped, unlimited potential. That's all total bullshit.
Samsung does have their top tablet at $600, though it doesn’t sell for full price (and often, nowhere near it). But they did move to Apple;s 3:2 screen format from the not very useful 16:9, and they give a good stylus with it. But for some reason, they saddled it with an older, slow SoC. Can’t understand the reasoning behind that.
If that were so, they wouldn’t have invested so much in trying to make a real go at it.
Even publicly advertising that their hardware design is this and that... taking a page from Apple and plastering it everywhere.
It hurts them in the in the public eye and deep in the heart that they cannot sell products to people. No one wants their stuff unless it’s free. They literally have to give themselves away (cue U2 song from iTunes) in order to be accepted. When they charge, they’re left with nothing.
Despite the restructure, google is just an ad company that wastes money on other stuff.
Yes, although it's more than an ad company too. Consumer hardware hasn't been its revenue driver and it is not even remotely part of its core business so you could wrap up each consumer hardware failure and put Christmas lights on them and it still wouldn't mean anything significant. That said, it's still a billion dollar part of the company. That's not a bad way to 'fail'. And in spite of everything the Pixel phones will probably get even better soon.
Pixel got massive praise and free advertising, but it wasn't really a very good phone. It's an ugly, rather outdated run-of-the-mill pair of HTC and LG handsets with a Google camera app (which can be sideloaded to other phones, if Google were really free and open and trying to get Android to improve as a loving parent rather than just another greedy capitalist trying to run a business that makes money in the model of Apple).
Google arrogantly thought it could walk in and take that away but it fell on its face and is now limping away.
"Google is backing out of tablets. It’s not leaving money on the table. There is no money on the table. "
That's because Google, like MS, has moved on to 2-in-1s. In that world, there is no room for a dedicated tablet. This is an interesting article on the state of the African / Middle Easter markets:
"Yet in the Middle East and African markets, the tide is turning away from tablets and back to PC's and 2-in-1 devices. And while the iPad Pro is considered a detachable device or a 2-in-1 device, Apple is simply not faring well in that particular market."
Whether, over time, that translates to other markets, who knows. iPad sales did see an uptick with the introduction of the $329 iPad and iPad Pro models but growth has leveled off.
Microsoft is not making significant money from all of its Surface operations: barely $1 billion in revenue per quarter since it started, and its profits are quite thin because it spends so much money servicing failed hardware.
When you say that detachables are where it's at, and iPads are leveling off, you also have to qualify those generalizations: Apple is the largest maker of tablets+detachables+slates globally, by a huge margin. Almost 2x the second place Samsung. Microsoft Surface isn't even in the top 5.
Nobody else shipping any volumes of devices is making any money. That's because #2 and #3 are Samsung and Amazon, which are dumping low-cost devices in the market, making it very hard for anyone else to compete with a profitable product, outside of the leader, iPad.
It's just bizarre that the media narrative keeps saying that success is failure and that various petty marginal busywork from companies that haven't made any money in the space after years of trying is all incredible work and has untapped, unlimited potential. That's all total bullshit.
"Microsoft is not making significant money from all of its Surface operations: barely $1 billion in revenue per quarter since it started,"
This is true but in the overall Windows ecosystem, MS' Surface isn't the only player. There's HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, all who have gotten much better at making good hardware.
And none of them are making money at it either.
but it’s significant for Microsoft, because for several years they declared themselves to be a device manufacturer. The only device they sell a lot of other than keyboards, cables and mice, is the Xbox, and they’ve always lost money on that, even when games, music, movie sales and rentals are included. Making vast profits on software has allowed them to have very large losses everywhere else in an attempt to gain a significant position in these other areas. They’ve failed to do so.
Nothing in that post is really true. Take Fire tablets. There are no more than about a million in sales a year. They started out well, and declined from the beginning to irrelevance. There’s no evidence that buying a Fire tablet increases sales of any kind for Amazon. In fact, it’s likely to result in lower sales, because anyone only willing to buy a really cheap tablet isn’t going to be spending a lot of money on much of anything.
i use iPads. I also buy a lot from Amazon. If instead, I bought a Fire, would I buy more? Not likely. I probably buy more than any ten Fire owners from Amazon now. They also haven’t been successful in getting special Fire apps in their store.
there is no profitable Alexa store, or eco-system. Nothing of value there at all. It’s just Bezos having his Apple jealousy exhibit itself in horrible hardware, such as that ridiculous Fire phone disaster.
most Android tablets sell for around $100, and are from China, or a couple of other Asian local manufacturers. Do they make a profit? Barely. Samsung is the second largest tablet maker after Apple, and estimates are that they sell between 15-25% as many tablets as Apple, but also are barely profitable. Their top of the line $600 list tablet is often given away for free if you buy a Galaxy phone. Not much profit in that.
google’s services are on maybe a third of all “Android” tablets sold around the world, because they’re not what we think of as “real” Android. They’re not even allowed to be marketed as Android. They’re AOSP, if you don’t know what that means, look it up. People call it Android though, which makes it confusing.
as far as audio books go, they aren’t major sellers. Don’t believe the hype.
As for what they were ''supposed" to achieve with each idea/project, it's moot as long as Google has its services running on most of the devices out there. In that sense, mission accomplished and if iPad sales are largely flat, it can definitely be put down to Android dominance from Google. As can the presence of a so called 'low cost' iPad in Apple's lineup.
My, how he tries. So precious.
Cognitive dissonance is real.
I linked to iPad marketshare over the last few years showing decline then flattening out.
I don't have to try. The reality is there staring straight at you. Of course, if you think Android tablets had nothing to do with all this I'm willing to hear you out.
But please don't fire back with "but the money goes to Apple". That is irrelevant when tablets like Amazon's offerings aren't even brought to market with high margins in the first place. Have you ever wondered why?Although that doesn't mean other Android tablets don't make money. They do.
Glad somebody gets this. Amazon tablets are extremely successful for the company, despite the low margins....because their whole point is different than the point of an iPad. Actually "points," because there are multiple goals for the Fire tablets: 1) Fire tablet owners are more likely to become and stay Prime members and to shop on Amazon. 2) Fire tablets are one of several avenues to lock people into the ever-more-profitable Alexa eco-system. 3) Fire tablets provide Amazon a research tool to discover what video content their customers like. 4) Their tablets are one of the key ways to distribute audio books to customers (Even Google admits that audio books are a burgeoning field).
As for what they were ''supposed" to achieve with each idea/project, it's moot as long as Google has its services running on most of the devices out there. In that sense, mission accomplished and if iPad sales are largely flat, it can definitely be put down to Android dominance from Google. As can the presence of a so called 'low cost' iPad in Apple's lineup.
My, how he tries. So precious.
Cognitive dissonance is real.
I linked to iPad marketshare over the last few years showing decline then flattening out.
I don't have to try. The reality is there staring straight at you. Of course, if you think Android tablets had nothing to do with all this I'm willing to hear you out.
But please don't fire back with "but the money goes to Apple". That is irrelevant when tablets like Amazon's offerings aren't even brought to market with high margins in the first place. Have you ever wondered why?Although that doesn't mean other Android tablets don't make money. They do.
Glad somebody gets this. Amazon tablets are extremely successful for the company, despite the low margins....because their whole point is different than the point of an iPad. Actually "points," because there are multiple goals for the Fire tablets: 1) Fire tablet owners are more likely to become and stay Prime members and to shop on Amazon. 2) Fire tablets are one of several avenues to lock people into the ever-more-profitable Alexa eco-system. 3) Fire tablets provide Amazon a research tool to discover what video content their customers like. 4) Their tablets are one of the key ways to distribute audio books to customers (Even Google admits that audio books are a burgeoning field).
While I agree with the opening remarks that Android tablets are dead, the reason is that ChromeOS is on the rise, and ChromeOS devices are taking the place of tablets in the Google world with multi-use Chromebooks.
The rest of the article is from another planet. According to this story ChromeOS is dead and Google is no longer supporting it after stopping sales of their Pixel Chromebook? Ah, what about the Pixelbook that was only released a few months ago and then refreshed with more powerful (and costly) models since the beginning of this year, seems like they are continuing to ramp up ChromeOS not abandon it. Have you been in a best buy lately? The Chromebooks they have on display have doubled in the last year. Costco is even selling them.
And I see you neglected to mention the education market where iPad has lost enormous market to ChromeOS. Android P doesn't have anything to do with the death of ChromeOS, if it did you wouldn't have seen so many new Chromebooks on display at CES and Barcelona. And even three new Chrome boxes are awaiting release this year from ASUS, HP and Acer, and CTL just released their new model, the first Chromebox to run Android apps out of the box.
Microsoft was chasing their tail trying to catch Google with Windows S, and now they've decided to change their strategy again as that hasn't worked, abandoning S. The only way Apple will be able to regain some of what it has lost is to start selling products at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, I think their time has come and gone for the masses. J
First of all, don’t use Google’s own hardware as an example. Google never sells more than a very small number of devices. Not that they don’t want to, but consumers just don’t seem to be interested.
google has been trying to get Chrome to replace cheap Windows notebooks, and expensive iPads (in education). To a certain extent, they’ve succeeded. But they’re stuck there. We’ve seen several manufactures attempt to push Chrome into higher levels of hardware, only to see those efforts fail. The problem is that Chrome still isn’t much of a full service OS. There is also very little software specifically written for it. Until that changes, not much will happen with it.
in addition, there’s evidence that Apple’s $329 model has eaten into Chrome sales. So we’ll see.
Android and Windows slates have not failed or died out....They evolved into a couple of things that the public wants. Most people do not want a tablet if we define "tablet" as the form factor invented by Apple in 2009. Tablet sales declined at the same time that Android has led the movement toward larger and larger phones and Windows has led the movement toward 2-in-1 laptop / tablet hybrids. Even though I still have a slate-form tablet, it's the Amazon Fire HD 10, which I use primarily as my gateway into Amazon media, and as a second "Alexa" device. Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use.....And they are examples of 2018's tablets. When you say Apple is leading the tablet market, that's precisely the same as Amazon bragging that they lead the e-reader category--i.e., they are leading in categories that the public generally does not want. And yes, I still use a Kindle e-reader. But that's because I'm one of those weird kinds who uses a device because it does what I want, not because of how popular or unpopular the device is.
That’s basically nonsense. Windows tablets have been a failure from the very beginning, and only Microsoft’s size and software profitability has allowed them to continue to bleed money over that. While I read about how well 2 in 1s are doing, I’ve yet to see that reflected in official sales numbers anywhere.
last quarter, in the USA, Apple had a 48% marketshare in tablets, around the world, it’s around 33%. That’s pretty good for a company whose tablets cost more than 95% of everyone else’s devices. It’s because in business and government, and that not just here, iOS devices average close to 90% of these in use. And both business and government have been moving to tablets, not away from them. Apple’s problems in tablet sales is not that people don’t want them, but that they last so dang long, that people don’t upgrade to new ones for five years.
thise cheap devices you use can hardly be called tablets without some snickering.
Large screen smartphones have driven off most mini sized tablets, except for those really cheap travesties I see around that sell for less than $100, which are so bad that most people throw them away after a month.
what we’re seeing as a shrinking of the tablet market is not so much a shrinking of full sized, properly powered tablets, but the loss in sales in that mini sector. Apple, for example, had a very large market for their 8” model, until the 6+ iPhone came out. The Mini was estimated to be a half of Apple tablet sales at the time. As Mini sales shrunk, so did Apple’s tablet sales. That’s not surprising, and it goes along with Apple’s willingness to obsolete a product with a newer one, which is what happened.
what I see, is that most consumers found that these cheap Android, and almost Android tablets, such as the Amazon Fire models, were just junk, and so sales began to drop rapidly. But huge companies such as Amazon can continue producing this stuff even if they are losing money. Small companies just go out of business.
its highly doubtful that people who are too cheap to buy a “real” tablet, and buy instead a bottom dweller such as the Fire, are going to be buying more from Amazon than before. It’s interesting about Prime too, because it’s understood that Amazon loses a lot of money on that every year. That’s why they raise the price every couple of years, or so. So people buying a Fire “tablet” are going to get Prime, maybe, after the free period, because they see what they can get with it that would cost them more, but not much else will change.
with Amazon losing money with every Fire sale, and every Prime membership, it’s hard to see what advantage Amazon gets out of this. But it’s been clear for years, that Bezos doesn’t care about Amazon making much in the way of profit, as long as he can undercut his rivals and put them out of business
Android and Windows slates have not failed or died out....They evolved into a couple of things that the public wants. Most people do not want a tablet if we define "tablet" as the form factor invented by Apple in 2009. Tablet sales declined at the same time that Android has led the movement toward larger and larger phones and Windows has led the movement toward 2-in-1 laptop / tablet hybrids. Even though I still have a slate-form tablet, it's the Amazon Fire HD 10, which I use primarily as my gateway into Amazon media, and as a second "Alexa" device. Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use.....And they are examples of 2018's tablets. When you say Apple is leading the tablet market, that's precisely the same as Amazon bragging that they lead the e-reader category--i.e., they are leading in categories that the public generally does not want. And yes, I still use a Kindle e-reader. But that's because I'm one of those weird kinds who uses a device because it does what I want, not because of how popular or unpopular the device is.
"Tablet sales declined at the same time that Android has led the movement toward larger and larger phones and Windows has led the movement toward 2-in-1 laptop / tablet hybrids." => Agreed.
"Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use" => Over time I think that's the direction the market will evolve: a large-screen smartphone + 2-in-1 or ultrabook.
I see a lot of writing on how good that camera is, but not much in actual photos. When I do see them, I don’t know what the fuss is about because I just don’t see anything better. In addition, what none of these publications like to mention is that this phone, as well as Samsung’s, and others, aren’t very reliable when talking about consistency. So they take some great photos, but right after, the exposure is off, or the color is off, or the noise reduction obscures the details. Sometimes you actually read a line or two about that, but they quickly bury it.
then I read about Google’s attempt as portrait mode, and read that it’s really good, about as good as what Apple has. But it’s not. When you see the rare comparison photos, it’s obvious that the Google’s are very two dimensional. No matter what they may want to say, there are things you simply can’t do with one camera, in software, that you can do with two camera, and software.
If that were so, they wouldn’t have invested so much in trying to make a real go at it.
Even publicly advertising that their hardware design is this and that... taking a page from Apple and plastering it everywhere.
It hurts them in the in the public eye and deep in the heart that they cannot sell products to people. No one wants their stuff unless it’s free. They literally have to give themselves away (cue U2 song from iTunes) in order to be accepted. When they charge, they’re left with nothing.
Despite the restructure, google is just an ad company that wastes money on other stuff.
Yes, although it's more than an ad company too. Consumer hardware hasn't been its revenue driver and it is not even remotely part of its core business so you could wrap up each consumer hardware failure and put Christmas lights on them and it still wouldn't mean anything significant. That said, it's still a billion dollar part of the company. That's not a bad way to 'fail'. And in spite of everything the Pixel phones will probably get even better soon.
Pixel got massive praise and free advertising, but it wasn't really a very good phone. It's an ugly, rather outdated run-of-the-mill pair of HTC and LG handsets with a Google camera app (which can be sideloaded to other phones, if Google were really free and open and trying to get Android to improve as a loving parent rather than just another greedy capitalist trying to run a business that makes money in the model of Apple).
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This is true but in the overall Windows ecosystem, MS' Surface isn't the only player. There's HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, all who have gotten much better at making good hardware.
"A short term strategy that won't last"?
How do you define 'short term' because Apple has been flat in tablets for a while now, and that in spite of a low cost option coming to market.
"It absolutely matters to make money".
No one questions that, but have you considered that simply making a profit, even if minimal, is what many manufacturers aim for from the outset?
There are Spanish manufacturers that you have never heard of making decent smartphones, ebook readers and tablets that largely go into retail via large resellers sometimes under the brand of the retailer. They have been in business for years. How is that even possible in your 'short term strategy that won't last'?
No doubt there are hundreds and hundreds of similar operations worldwide that don't even register the slightest blip on your radar but when you take the likes of Huawei, Samsung, Lenovo and Amazon out of the Android picture you are still left with something called 'other' and that's where those tiny (and some not so) manufacturers live. And guess what, that 'other' is huge.
Some here just love to tell us all about it when some of those companies go out of business but there is nothing strange about it. Far bigger tech companies have also gone out of business. That's the nature of the beast but 'other' is still there and still huge. Yes, there will be convergence and the big players will get bigger but that is also the nature of the beast. Bigger companies buy smaller (and not so small) companies. For all its efforts, where would Apple be today without certain acquisitions. No need to clone if you can buy the technology outright, right ;-).
You love to tell us that Apple is the biggest company in the world. The company that makes the most profit. In the past I'm sure you also banged the 'Apple is premium drum and didn't need to fish in the murky lower bands' but some companies, like I just mentioned are not in the business to be the biggest. That's not part of the plan and never was.
How things have changed. Even for Apple. They moved back from where they were going on the low cost iPad. Lower tech screen assembly and, shock horror, thicker! Try to imagine the current iPad market situation without that model.
People were telling me the MBA was EoL in 2016. It's still with us in 2018 and there are even rumours of an update. Unthinkable!
People told me there was no need for larger screened iPhones. The Plus models then promptly became mega sellers.
People told me in 2016 that USB-C was the future and that all prior USB would vanish from new future Macs. Then the iMac and iMac Pro proved them wrong.
When I suggested the 'X' name for iPhone and that 'black' should be dumped, some showed scorn.
Incredible how some people can be so sure of themselves to the point of telling others (who are simply offering opinions) they are simply wrong and not see how they themselves are the ones that are later wrong.
We are all 'pundits' to a degree, even those who use the term in a belittling manner to describe others. Everybody has their opinion. Those opinions should at least be respected.
And you will be surprised to learn that the Spanish company I was referring to has not 'cloned' anything. It simply offers half decent products at attractive prices. It is still in business.
Now let's bring the bigger players back into the scheme of things as they also form a large chunk of the Android tablet world too. They have other possible revenue streams that don't necessarily have huge profits from each sale as a goal. Amazon definitely doesn't. Some, like Samsung, sometimes use tablets as part of the deal on other sales (TVs, phones, washing machines etc). Believe me, it's effective. Huawei's tablets get better and better even though they haven't been in the market for long. Hey, for a relative newbie, the MateBook even took on the iPad Pro. Microsoft? Some will snigger at that but if they stay in the market, I doubt they'll get worse. Food for thought.
So with all that happening, the focus is put on Google for dropping tablets? In the bigger scheme of things, how could we put that into perspective? Like when Apple dropped its Airport products? Irrelevant? Insignificant?
One this is for sure, it is simply not a big deal. Not in the slightest.
The rest of the article is from another planet. According to this story ChromeOS is dead and Google is no longer supporting it after stopping sales of their Pixel Chromebook? Ah, what about the Pixelbook that was only released a few months ago and then refreshed with more powerful (and costly) models since the beginning of this year, seems like they are continuing to ramp up ChromeOS not abandon it. Have you been in a best buy lately? The Chromebooks they have on display have doubled in the last year. Costco is even selling them.
And I see you neglected to mention the education market where iPad has lost enormous market to ChromeOS. Android P doesn't have anything to do with the death of ChromeOS, if it did you wouldn't have seen so many new Chromebooks on display at CES and Barcelona. And even three new Chrome boxes are awaiting release this year from ASUS, HP and Acer, and CTL just released their new model, the first Chromebox to run Android apps out of the box.
Microsoft was chasing their tail trying to catch Google with Windows S, and now they've decided to change their strategy again as that hasn't worked, abandoning S. The only way Apple will be able to regain some of what it has lost is to start selling products at a more reasonable price. Otherwise, I think their time has come and gone for the masses. J
"Otherwise, a 2-in-1 and a Note 8 large-screen "phablet" are what I use" => Over time I think that's the direction the market will evolve: a large-screen smartphone + 2-in-1 or ultrabook.
Demand for iPads were eaten up by larger iPhones, the same way as iPod sales were eaten up by iPhone with an iPod app on it, not by cheap MP3 players. Those competitors fell in concert with iPod sales, just as Android tablets have fallen with iPad (and fallen faster).
https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/15/solving-the-mysterious-failure-of-apples-ipad
https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/05/04/apples-ipad-business-isnt-collapsing-but-the-rest-of-the-tablet-industry-sure-is
If you read the articles, you can see it was clear what was causing iPad sales to go down as it was happening. It just wasn't reported correctly elsewhere, as the headlines reflect. Apple's iPad business didn't collapse, but the rest of the tablet industry did.
You replied to a totally phony post. But to your point: Apple is losing share to Chromebooks and Windows netbooks in education. But remember that this is largely because Apple had an unusually high market share in that segment, back when education was considered to be one of the least valuable markets for PCs. Apple's high market share (+50% through its most beleaguered days) was blown off by pundits because "edu didn't matter and was of little value."
Today, Apple is making major inroads into markets it has never materially participated in: enterprise sales, China, Europe and emerging countries are all buying iPads and Macs on a new scale. PC makers are retreating and licking wounds. The entire PC market is shrinking while Apple is growing.
What gets reported? That Google and Microsoft are dumping (zero profit dumping) their OS on education sales of <$200 netbooks on schools, a market segment that never got talked about while Apple owned it.
So yes, Apple's unit market share is going down in U.S. Education. But nobody is entering the market and making money. That's not happening elsewhere. Nobody wants to buy Chromebooks apart from starved US public schools that have been stripped of funding and are now being run as charities, who will take them in exchange for giving up access to student data.
If you think that's a great move by Google hardware, show me the money. It's not there. No PC makers are making any money opposite Google in edu netbooks, just as nobody is making money in tablets on either side. Meanwhile, despite its lower market share, Apple continues to make money in k12, and it owns higher education, where individuals choose what to buy, rather than starved-to-the-bone US k12 school districts who have no choice but to accept virtually free netbooks.
Two things:
Apple is still making LOTS of money in iPads while it ships about 1-4 of all tablets+detachables+slates globally. Think about that. +$5 billion in the last quarter. Google made nothing.
As this article shows, Google tried for years to make a tablet and then gave up after never making any money or achieving anything apart from failure.
Lots of talk about how Apple TV is being outsold by cheaper devices in terms of units, but Apple hasn't gotten out of the business. Instead, it keeps improving its box. It just released Apple TV 4K.
If Apple had discontinued Apple TV 4 and stopped supporting all of its older models in the next iOS 12, you might have a point. But that's not what's happening. And that's why Google abandoning tablets is news while Roku giving away TV boxes while Apple makes far more money from Apple TV is not really.
Note which story is being falsely covered in sensational clickbait sources that don't know which way the wind blows.
It failed at Chromebooks with third parties and failed at great expense to try selling its own Chromebook Pixel 2013-2017. Pixelbook is commercially irrelevant. Google can't even sell Pixel handsets with rebates, it's not going to be able to ship a $1000 netbook only capable of running a browser.
So to say Google is moving from tablets to netbooks/laptops of some sort is backward. It failed with both in parallel.
Citing some impoverished market and saying its shifting from tablets to "2n1s" is just a reflection of the fact that the cheapest PC-devices are shifting away from one failure to retreat back into the more common PC format. It's not growth. 2n1s are not an expansion of PC sales. PC sales are trending downward overall.
iPad Pro outsold "detachables" as fast as IDC could invent a new PC market to segregate PC into a silo it could talk about without being run over by Apple. The numbers in this article cite tablets+detachables+slates.
As for "Who Knows" - the data is freely available. This is all common knowledge.
as for Windows tablets overall, they’re going nowhere. As evidence, we can look to enterprise adoption. That’s where we would expect to see Windows tablets ruling. But in enterprise (large organizations which includes education and government), 91% of tablets are iPads, and 6% are Android, almost all Samsung, and the other 2% is Windows.
https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/semantic-image-segmentation-with.html
Of course that doesn't mean they aren't still greedy capitalists much as nearly every other company is to the pleasure of their owners and investors.
but it’s significant for Microsoft, because for several years they declared themselves to be a device manufacturer. The only device they sell a lot of other than keyboards, cables and mice, is the Xbox, and they’ve always lost money on that, even when games, music, movie sales and rentals are included. Making vast profits on software has allowed them to have very large losses everywhere else in an attempt to gain a significant position in these other areas. They’ve failed to do so.
i use iPads. I also buy a lot from Amazon. If instead, I bought a Fire, would I buy more? Not likely. I probably buy more than any ten Fire owners from Amazon now. They also haven’t been successful in getting special Fire apps in their store.
there is no profitable Alexa store, or eco-system. Nothing of value there at all. It’s just Bezos having his Apple jealousy exhibit itself in horrible hardware, such as that ridiculous Fire phone disaster.
most Android tablets sell for around $100, and are from China, or a couple of other Asian local manufacturers. Do they make a profit? Barely. Samsung is the second largest tablet maker after Apple, and estimates are that they sell between 15-25% as many tablets as Apple, but also are barely profitable. Their top of the line $600 list tablet is often given away for free if you buy a Galaxy phone. Not much profit in that.
google’s services are on maybe a third of all “Android” tablets sold around the world, because they’re not what we think of as “real” Android. They’re not even allowed to be marketed as Android. They’re AOSP, if you don’t know what that means, look it up. People call it Android though, which makes it confusing.
as far as audio books go, they aren’t major sellers. Don’t believe the hype.
google has been trying to get Chrome to replace cheap Windows notebooks, and expensive iPads (in education). To a certain extent, they’ve succeeded. But they’re stuck there. We’ve seen several manufactures attempt to push Chrome into higher levels of hardware, only to see those efforts fail. The problem is that Chrome still isn’t much of a full service OS. There is also very little software specifically written for it. Until that changes, not much will happen with it.
in addition, there’s evidence that Apple’s $329 model has eaten into Chrome sales. So we’ll see.
That’s basically nonsense. Windows tablets have been a failure from the very beginning, and only Microsoft’s size and software profitability has allowed them to continue to bleed money over that. While I read about how well 2 in 1s are doing, I’ve yet to see that reflected in official sales numbers anywhere.
last quarter, in the USA, Apple had a 48% marketshare in tablets, around the world, it’s around 33%. That’s pretty good for a company whose tablets cost more than 95% of everyone else’s devices. It’s because in business and government, and that not just here, iOS devices average close to 90% of these in use. And both business and government have been moving to tablets, not away from them. Apple’s problems in tablet sales is not that people don’t want them, but that they last so dang long, that people don’t upgrade to new ones for five years.
thise cheap devices you use can hardly be called tablets without some snickering.
what we’re seeing as a shrinking of the tablet market is not so much a shrinking of full sized, properly powered tablets, but the loss in sales in that mini sector. Apple, for example, had a very large market for their 8” model, until the 6+ iPhone came out. The Mini was estimated to be a half of Apple tablet sales at the time. As Mini sales shrunk, so did Apple’s tablet sales. That’s not surprising, and it goes along with Apple’s willingness to obsolete a product with a newer one, which is what happened.
what I see, is that most consumers found that these cheap Android, and almost Android tablets, such as the Amazon Fire models, were just junk, and so sales began to drop rapidly. But huge companies such as Amazon can continue producing this stuff even if they are losing money. Small companies just go out of business.
its highly doubtful that people who are too cheap to buy a “real” tablet, and buy instead a bottom dweller such as the Fire, are going to be buying more from Amazon than before. It’s interesting about Prime too, because it’s understood that Amazon loses a lot of money on that every year. That’s why they raise the price every couple of years, or so. So people buying a Fire “tablet” are going to get Prime, maybe, after the free period, because they see what they can get with it that would cost them more, but not much else will change.
with Amazon losing money with every Fire sale, and every Prime membership, it’s hard to see what advantage Amazon gets out of this. But it’s been clear for years, that Bezos doesn’t care about Amazon making much in the way of profit, as long as he can undercut his rivals and put them out of business
then I read about Google’s attempt as portrait mode, and read that it’s really good, about as good as what Apple has. But it’s not. When you see the rare comparison photos, it’s obvious that the Google’s are very two dimensional. No matter what they may want to say, there are things you simply can’t do with one camera, in software, that you can do with two camera, and software.