The immense popularity of the iPad, and now the iPad 2 (recently reviewed by The Daily’s Peter Ha), has Apple’s competitors, in the words of Steve Jobs, flummoxed. What to do? According to a J.P. Morgan Research analyst, it may well be that all of these competitor tablets will be sitting on the store shelves as folks decide en masse that the iPad is the way to go. In other words, competitors trying to convince people that their tablet is “better” than the iPad could well be wasting their time. And money, of course.
The report, which was obtained by Cnet, was presented by one Mark Moskowitz and says that competitors trying to play catch-up are going to have a “tough” time, and that the effort to flood the market with tablets could result in a severe over-saturation. Nothing’s quite worse than sinking a bunch of money into a product’s R&D, manufacturing too many of them, then having them sit on store shelves—next to signs that say, “Sorry, we’re out of iPads. Check back later!”
The report also mentions that, because so many manufactures are jumping aboard the tablet bandwagon we might start to see relevant supplies—glass, processors, flash chips, etc.—become stretched, making these tablets even more expensive to produce. Meaning, of course, that every unsold tablet will hurt just that little bit extra.
The report also says that it’s expected that many consumers will be “underwhelmed” by the many iPad alternatives out there, such as the Motorola Xoom and other Honeycomb-wielding models.