Yes, Android is a free-wheeling mess. But I am not concerned.
I see this as a replay of the 1980s. Apple was the dominant player with a premium option on nice hardware, a consolidated set of software options, and facing fragmented opposition. (Then the PC/Windows landscape. Now Android.)
Then Steve Jobs was yanked from the picture (then by being fired, now by dying), Apple lost its focus, and the fact that so many people were on the messy platform caused it to win in the marketplace.
There are big differences. Tim Cook is hopefully not as incompetent as John Sculley proved to be. Google is not Microsoft reborn.
But we've seen this before. The rule of thumb in computers for decades has been, "the commodity always wins". And Android is better positioned to be that commodity than Apple is.
> I see this as a replay of the 1980s. Apple was the dominant player with a premium option on nice hardware
No they weren't. In Job's first stint at Apple he was beaten by Commodore.
Commodore were vertically integrated. They owned the company who designed the chips in early Apple computers. They focussed aggressively on price, and they won the battles with the Vic 20, C64 and early Amigas. After a bunch of crazy decisions at the end of the decade they eventually lost the war and died a death in the mid 90s.
As they say, it's the winner of the war who gets to write the history books, and in Cupertino they're done an excellent job at it.
Then the commodity is the iPad. Eventually this may change but it's 2012 and a serious competitor hasn't been built yet (going by what I've seen from CES).
There are still some major differences between the early 80s and the current market:
* IBM: They owned the office long before Apple came along and continued that dominance with their invention of PC. IBM isn't in the tablet business. RIM tried to make a play and did poorly. Increasing corporate tablet sales are going to Apple.
* Price: Compared to a Mac the PC was cheap. Nowadays tablet makers are having a hard time building <$500 tablet that will sell.
This is likely to change in the next generation though. Currently the sub-$500 tablets are pretty poor but cheap Tegra 3 devices are going to be good enough for a lot of people.
This was said about every previous generation of Android tablet. The problem is Apple's execution has been flawless: price, performance, delivery dates, supply, apps, and marketing.
A lot of people are assuming things will play out the way they did in the 80s. Like Apple didn't learn anything. They realize developers, price, supply all those things matter. Which is why I don't believe 2012 will be anything like 1984.
The first generation of Android phones was terrible too.
What I hope and expect to happen is that in the next year or two we see real competition in the tablet market. Apple is likely to stay on top at least in the near future but I predict lower cost Android tablets are going to start to exert real pressure on them soon.
There's only been one generation of Android tablets that's played out and they all came with Honeycomb with Tegra 2's. Even Google admitted that HC was a thrown together hack so its not surprising that the devices weren't particularly competitive. The upcoming Tegra 3 devices is the second generation.
They were preceded by a generation of single-core Android 2.x tablets, which were terrible. And that includes the original Galaxy Tab that was sufficiently Google-supported to get access to all the proprietary Google apps and the Marketplace.
The best devices of the Honeycomb generation are pretty compelling, especially after getting an upgrade to ICS.
The only Google sanctioned "tablet" from that time was as you mention the Galaxy Tab. The only reason it had the market was because it was essentially a big phone. In Europe, you even pop a sim in it and make calls out of the box. However, the others were not sanctioned thus hardly qualifying as a "generation" and even the Galaxy Tab was discouraged by various people involved in Android development.
Not to mention that the PC vs. Mac wars have come full circle. With PC's becoming completely commoditized, noone able to differentiate/ offer compelling products while Apple's market share and margins continue to grow.
PC margins have always been razor thin and Mac margins have always been better. PCs have always been commodity, that's the whole point. People used to refer to them as "beige boxes."
After his return, Jobs managed to turn Macs into fashion accessories, first with the iMac. This put the Mac into a category where it wasn't competing directly with PCs, where it's been ever sense.
But let's not kid ourselves. Apple lost the battle for the desktop computer in the 80s, and it never regained it. Jobs returned Apple to profitability by giving up on that market and positioned the company into a new one.
One difference that the OP failed to mention, between desktop computers and cellphones, is that cellphones are worn and therefore have always had an element of fashion to them. It's unlikely that cellphones will ever be "beige boxified" since there's no customer that sees them as being purely utilitarian and will ignore physical aesthetics.
no customer that sees them as being purely utilitarian and will ignore physical aesthetics.
Except for, you know, about 3 billion customers in Asia and Africa who cannot pay a premium for aesthetics but whom cheap dumbphones first allowed to communicate outside their immediate surroundings (no landlines there), and whom cheap Android smartphonse are now (or in the near future) first allowing to access the internet.
Are these people in the third world putting their credit card into an app store and buying software? How do cheap android devices in third world countries validate android as a developer platform in the long run?
I'm not trying to be snarky here btw, legitimate questions.
Eventually they will buy software and services that provide value to them, which can be things for which first-world countries have an existing infrastructure, but which have so far been completely unavailable to these people.
For example, in parts of Africa, transferrable pre-paid phone credit has become a de facto bank acount for many people who've never had access to non-cash transactions.
Other examples: third-world countries have many subsistence farmers. Accurate local weather forecasts and information about current market prices in neighboring towns could be very valuable to them.
As for payment - credit cards may not play a huge role, but centralized app stores can easily support a diverse range of nation-specific payment options (like the phone credit mentioned above).
In places like Africa you buy phones from a stall in a market square. No contracts, because they're not enforceable.
I think the only credible (and very real[1]) competitor to low-spec Android handsets is Windows Phone, which with the Tango update will run on really low-spec hardware. Nokia is playing a solid game here.
[1] Real because Nokia rule the feature-phone market, not so much in Asia but very much in Africa. Nokia have a reputation for quality there that Android, as the new kid on the block, will have a hard time displacing.
Which part of 'on-contract' you didn't understand? The full phone price is in the price of contract with interest.
Of course you can buy sub-$50 phones on contract too, in which case the monthly payment would be much lower than AT&T's $99 iPhone plan, of which about half goes towards the phone payment.
But let's not kid ourselves. Apple lost the battle for the desktop computer in the 80s, and it never regained it. Jobs returned Apple to profitability by giving up on that market and positioned the company into a new one.
Are you seriously describing the company making 3 times as much profit as their nearest competitor and consistently outgrowing them all for more than 20 straight quarters as "giving up on the market"?
I see this as a replay of the 1980s. Apple was the dominant player with a premium option on nice hardware, a consolidated set of software options, and facing fragmented opposition. (Then the PC/Windows landscape. Now Android.)
Then Steve Jobs was yanked from the picture (then by being fired, now by dying), Apple lost its focus, and the fact that so many people were on the messy platform caused it to win in the marketplace.
There are big differences. Tim Cook is hopefully not as incompetent as John Sculley proved to be. Google is not Microsoft reborn.
But we've seen this before. The rule of thumb in computers for decades has been, "the commodity always wins". And Android is better positioned to be that commodity than Apple is.