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30 million isn't that much, considering the hype and the calls for the death of the desktop. It's comparable to the number of Linux users.

Yes it is comparable to the number of Linux users but Linux has been around for 20 years and the iPad 17 months.

On a global scale, that's really not that many units sold for a consumer device. Especially not considering that it is supposed to usher in the death of the desktop.
For $500 you can get a decent laptop that does more than an iPad, not to mention desktop systems.
Might explain why Apple haven't sold more units.



Uh, yeah, ok. Maybe you need to step out of the RDF for a while.



Yea, that didnt work out AT ALL for the IBM PC. Apple was such a dominant player in the desktop space. Not learning from the past, are we.

It's actually the fastest selling consumer product in the history of man kind.


You can but the iPad is not really there to compete with a $500 (Windows) laptop. You can do stuff on such a laptop but (for most people) the experience will not be nearly as pleasant as the using an iPad 2.


I'll just say again here that the iPad is the fastest selling consumer product in human history.



Uh, yeah, ok. Maybe you need to step out of the RDF for a while.
"

Actually, at this time, there is a very small non-iPad tablet market, and a very large iPad market. That's the reality today.

It might change and the iPad could become like the iPhone with 20% market share or it could be like the iPod with 65% marker share.



I don't know about the past but Apple today is worth more then Dell, HP, and Lenovo combined so I don't think they need to learn much from the past.

I think Apple learned all the right lessons from the past and not the idiotic ones (licence the OS etc).

Here are a few of the many lessons learned:

a) Build a better value stack for your customers (world's best and biggest app store, world's best retail experience, world's best brand, world's best digital content store, etc).

b) Build a set of products that cater for every market segment, except the piss poor crap end, and which are highly integrated, snap together in ingenious ways, allow easy user skill and content migration.

c) Build the world's best supply chain and use your cash mountain to not only secure the best components but prevent your competitors from getting their hands on any. Note the way that would be Macbook Air competitors cannot get any unibody manufacturing deals because Apple sewed them up. Similarly when the retina display iPad arrives probably next year no one else will be able to buy such displays.

d) Based on the above build products that no one can else can match in price and quality and make any money on. Kill the OEMs one by one.

Apple built a business with the iPad from scratch, with an entirely new product range in a product category that was minute, that if it was a stand alone business would have been in the fortune 500 in just 18 months. Trying to dismiss the scale of Apple's achievement or the size of the impact it is having on the PC and tech world is just silly. The iPad is kicking away the last legs that the sclerotic PC makers were leaning on. HP' departure won't be the last.

Interesting. All these years later that Apple is the fastest growing computer company in the world and making the most money. This is not a battle, it's a war. MS won the PC battle for 20 years. Blew up just like Android. Now Windows is losing steam, and Apple still has plenty of room to grow.

But while all that was happening Apple came out with the iPod which just like the iPad was over priced device that no one needed but just like a Benz or BMW it's a status symbol that people will pay a premium for just because it's Apple. No one else is gonna match that.

There will be iPads and then everything else like in the music player market.

Ah, that leaves a mere 6 billion 927 million people...


Let me guess, and there was also only iPod market?...


Can't wait.

That's correct. If I remember rightly once the iPod took off we were promised an iPod killer pretty much every other month. None succeeded. The iPod's market domination only ended when it was superseded by a new Apple device the iPhone. iPod Touch sales are still very healthy (and are a very useful entry level device to those new to the iOS world). There was never a music player market, just an iPod market and lots of unimportant, low volume, low profit fast forgotten junk music players.

There isn't even really an iPad market, there's an Apple market. What people wanted was a tablet Mac, what they got was a giant iPod, and Apple fans still flock to the Apple stores in droves to pick up their giant iPods. Then there's the curious-with-a-credit-card-sans-brain like me who bought an iPad 1 around release; I honestly expected more of it.

get your ipad here only 200kr/month for 24 months

All that it means is that nearly 30 million people have money to blow and all the rest do not. So much for the "rest of us".

Wow 30 million! That means >99.5% of people in the world don't own an iPad!

Yet! Apple is only just starting

Funny, because I could have sworn that there was another
overly-sanitized, gated community-esque platform which had almost that exact number of users at its peak... before the more open, less-restrictive alternatives caught up and completely annihilated them. Damn it, what were they called again? The name is right on the tip ofmy tongue...

Oh yeah, that was "America Online". By Apple fanboy logic, AOL "beat" the internet because they had a greater number of users than any other single ISP. Remind me, how did that work out for them in the long run?



Yeah, keep telling yourself that. Look at the history of general-purpose computing and you'll see that walled-garden single-vendor systems ALWAYS lose to open, multi-vendor systems. It's only a matter of time before Android does to iOS what the "real" internet did to AOL 10-15 years ago.

Posted from my Xoom.
Hahaha,
BallmerKnowsBest