They are about as competitive as a 15" laptop is to a netbook: not very as they are physically quite different. The price difference reflects this.
And don't forget Christensen's adage that the truly disruptive technology is typically a little bit worse and a whole lot cheaper than the incumbent technology.
One way or another, there are some big advantages to a smaller screen.
Anecdotally, I find that the iPad size is great for a table/lap, but less great for holding, while I love the size/shape/weight of the Kindle2 for reading. I don't think any particular size will win out.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
You can still buy a laptop for a lot less than $999, though, and that's where other people will come out of the woodwork to show you loud, clumsy looking Acer and HP machines.
Yup, that's why I specifically mentioned the Air vs. Ultrabooks, a $399 Acer isn't in the same class.
I don't think they release the shuffle because their higher-priced products were suffering in comparison to budget competitors. They released the shuffle because there was demand at the $100 price point that they could profitably address without undercutting their more expensive products.
If your work involves a lot of writing, then the iPad isn't an obvious boon [1]. But if you can do your work more efficiently by treating data and actions as symbols, the iPad is just overflowing with potential, much of it already being realized. Musicians, artists, animators, logicians, teachers, doctors, researchers; the list of professions offered new ways to work is getting longer and longer. To these people, the iPad can be life-changing.
I don't think the Kindle Fire will change anything. It's just not in Amazon's DNA to make a product focused on anything other than buying and consuming content — and there's never been a shortage of ways to buy things.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-e...
I tried using the iPad, but the lack of support for LaTeX or papers in svn, git or mercurial repositories made it completely unusable for anything resembling work.
Most journals in my field require Word docs, and don't use LaTeX. It's been my observation that the field is filled with business people who use computers, and relatively fewer computer people who ended up in business. Sure, there are some of each, but the former seem to outnumber the latter.
Musicians, artists, animators, ??? logicians??teachers, doctors, researchers!
haha Doctors need to enter lots of information and prefer a laptop / proper keyboard. As far as researchers are concerned any serious researcher will be either using legacy software or cutting edge software that runs on specialized machine. And oh if you actually leave your hipster utopia you will realize that teachers get paid peanuts.
please iPad is a toy and kindle fire is a cheaper and much more affordable toy.
In all of these areas, I can see the potential for multitouch-based applications that go far, far beyond what we're currently seeing, or have ever seen on a traditional mouse/keyboard computer. In fact, in my current line of work as a developer, I'm pursuing these very things.
If you're in a line of work where you're attempting to push the boundaries of what's possible with a computer, I find it hard to believe that you aren't fully aware of the realized and unrealized potential of multitouch devices.
Just because the iPad feels like a toy right now, doesn't mean it's limited to that sort of usage for all people, from now on. I just don't see Amazon playing any role in pushing user-facing technology forward. Silk is brilliant, but the Fire doesn't really enable anything that wasn't previously possible, and I don't see that changing. The iPad did.
Maybe multitouch will make all kinds of exciting differences. Maybe it won't. As long as you agree that you can't point to any of these exciting results yet, we're on the same page.
..and all the stories about grandparents getting iPads. These are all anectodes of course, and we'll have to wait for the peer-reviewed papers to come in some years from now.
You can call the iPad a toy all you want. I'm sure some Delta and United pilots will disagree (hopefully they don't allow games on the iPads they have).
Lots of people called the first Mac a toy with its silly mouse and GUI when it was released, yet here we are.
> much less discoverable
You are just making that up, right?
Health care is the one area where tablets did very well even before the iPad, and iPads have proven to be popular among doctors.
Any reference for that?
Again, I don't know whether the software to make those tasks workable _could_ exist; I simply have experiential evidence that it does not yet.
Pretty safe to say, Amazon's tablet is going to beat all the other android-tablets.
According to some surveys[1], most people view the $500 price for a tablet as premium anyway, and it's about the maximum price they would pay, which might mean even though Apple sells most tablets right now, they're probably selling them only to that niche market that think a tablet is worth $500.
The $200 pricing range hasn't been explored properly yet, and I think when it will be, a lot more people will become interested in tablets. We'll probably see an avalanche of "good enough" $200 tablets next year.
[1] - http://gigaom.com/mobile/heres-how-much-consumers-will-pay-f...
The days of the $700 tablet are over.