Steve Jobs sees nothing to suggest that Apple has anything to fear from rivals to the iPad, most of which will be “dead on arrival”.
During a rare appearance at Apple’s quarterly conference call with analysts, where he also dismissed threats to the iPhone, the Apple chief executive outlined six reasons why he thinks the iPad will prevail.
To begin with, 10 months after Apple announced the iPad there just isn’t that much competition.
“It to be just a handful of credible entrants, not exactly an avalanche,” Jobs said.
Secondly, almost all of them use seven-inch screens
“One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a seven-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on the seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion.”
And increasing screen resolution won’t help, without sandpaper.
“It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size. Apple’s done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.”
Third, said Jobs, every tablet user is also a smartphone user.
“No tablet can compete with the mobility of a smartphone, its ease of fitting into your pocket or purse, its unobtrusiveness when used in a crowd.”
So the potential benefit of a smaller tablet is no benefit at all: “giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in our pockets is clearly the wrong tradeoff.” Not only are seven-inch tablets to small to compete with an iPad, they are also too big to compete with a smartphone.
Fourthly, most new tablets are running Android and suffer from the same problems faced by Android phones that Jobs described.
“Even Google is telling the tablet manufacturers not to use their current release, Froyo, for tablets, and to wait for a special tablet release next year. What does it mean when your software suppliers says not to use their software in your tablet? And what does it mean when you ignore them and use it anyway?,” which is what has happened.
Reason number five is apps. There are more than 35,000 iPad apps, said Jobs. “This new crop of tablets will have near zero.”
Lastly, no-one can match Apple’s price
“The iPad incorporates everything we have learnt about building high value products from iPhones, iPods and Macs. We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything. And this results in an incredible product at a great price. The proof of this will be in the pricing of our competitor’s products which will likely offer less for more.”
As a result, most rivals tablets will be “DOA, Dead on Arrival”.
“Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the seven-inch bandwagon with an orphan product. Sounds like lots of fun ahead.”
