The tablet market was dead for years Aside from a robust but small market in PMPs (by companies like Archos), the "tablet" market is but an offshot of the netb

The tablet market was dead for years Aside from a robust but small market in PMPs (by companies like Archos), the "tablet" market is but an offshot of the netbook market: People just wanted to browse the web and consume media, and the iPad is Apple's entrant into that realm. The Netbook market was all the rage until Apple decided to essentially hop on that bandwagon. Netbooks have suffered because the iPad is a decent competitor and brings some of the advantages of being a much lighter internet appliance of the sort that Andreeson really dreamed of. Heck, you could even say that the iPad was a me-too entrant in the eReader market. While this has been largely forgotten, when the iPad was introduced the comparative focus, including by Apple, was against products like the Kindle and the Nook. Apple blew everyone away with the iPhone, but two years later the cloners had finally honed their game and now Apple is watching themselves get nudged towards the luxury niche they're so comfortable with. Luxury? Really? People with McJobs have iPhones. It isn't a luxury item. Apple sells products at or below the low price end in virtually every market they touch. They are the perfect definition of a mass-market, consumer product company. In any case, after leveraging the huge ecosystem of iPod tie-ins and mindspace, Apple managed some good inroads into a quickly evolving smartphone market (which, it should be noted, they feared would take away from their MP3 player market). They got some good momentum, but now they're seeing vigorous competition.