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I don't think that's the case, but there definitely isn't a market for tablets that fail to compete on features or price. The brilliance of what Apple has done
by Legion 15y ago
I don't think that's the case, but there definitely isn't a market for tablets that fail to compete on features or price.
The brilliance of what Apple has done with their mobile products is hard to overstate. They put all this effort into designing mobile chips and a mobile OS for the iPhone and iPod Touch. They took the fruits of those efforts and stuck them into a tablet format, and bam, you've got an iPad. They took them and stuck them into a set-top box, and bam, you've got the Apple TV 2G.
They get to spread the development costs of their silicon and OS over these four product lines. Talk about efficient reuse of your development investment. I own three separate devices powered by an A4 CPU and iOS operating system.
- wmf 15y agoYet somehow the same strategy is not working that well for Android tablets and STBs.
- Legion 15y agoYou mean the one platform besides iOS that actually does have a foothold in the market? Android is now 20% of the tablet market, while the BB Playbook is nowhere and the HP TouchPad can't even stay alive for two months.
- xp84 15y agoMain reason being they can't even compete on price without those fat carrier subsidies that it took to get Android for phones off the ground. They're pretty much at price parity with the market leader with a fraction of the useful apps, and surprised why they're not selling that well. Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves. Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoIt's even more efficient when you just relabel a standard chip you bought from Samsung and just tell everyone that you've put lots of effort into designing it. Works much better than I'd have imagined anyway.
- RexRollman 15y agoApple does more than "relabel" their chips. They bought Intrinsity specifically to create customized Arm chips for their products.
- masklinn 15y agoIntrinsity does not "create customized ARM chips", they optimize existing designs. There's been nothing impressive so far in Apple's chips, they're pretty standard design though thought to have been optimized by Intrinsity's folks. Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
- RexRollman 15y agoSo optimizing an existing design just for Apple isn't customizing it? I disagree.
- masklinn 15y ago> So optimizing an existing design just for Apple isn't customizing it? It's customizing the design, not creating a custom design.
- RexRollman 15y agoOkay, I see what your saying. Thanks!
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoAt least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts. SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsView.do?news_id=1030 http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsVie... "Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."