El mercado del iPad y el tablet…

Desde que Apple presentó una menor venta de iPads en sus resultados trimestrales la pasada semana… es la comidilla en internet el asunto del éxito del iPad (y el tablet por extensión).

Antes de los resultados, en previsión de esa menor venta, ya escribió sobre el tema Jean Louis Gassée en su Monday Note:

The iPad’s limitations extend beyond classic office productivity tasks. I just tried to build an itinerary for a long postponed road trip, driving all the way from Key West Florida to Palo Alto. On a Mac, you can easily “print to PDF” to produce a map for each leg of the trip. Then you use the wonderful Preview app (I salute its author and dedicated maintainer) to emend unneeded pages, drag and drop, combine and rearrange the PDF files into a single document. Don’t try this on an iPad: How would you “print-to-PDF” a map page, let alone combine such pages?

Escribí a raíz de este artículo un pensamiento propio en AppleTalk:

Porque… ¿de verdad estamos preparados para la era post-pc? ¿O de verdad la era post-pc que Jobs anunció es la de quitarnos el poder de crear para dejarnos el poder de consumir lo que nos den? ¿Nos hemos de limitar a escribir tuits como muestra de lo que es capaz de hacer el ser humano? O whatsapps con el emoji de una mierdecita con ojos… :-((
Lo dudo, fue Jobs quien dijo “el ordenador es una bicicleta para la mente”

24 horas después de publicar… leo el interesante artículo de Ben Bajarin en tech.pinions, diciendo lo contrario:

We never modeled the tablet to have a total addressable market as large as the smartphone but we also agree it is larger than the PCs TAM which currently sits around 1.5b (although declining). We remain bullish on the tablet but the dust must settle in pure consumer markets with their use of the PC. We believe the iPad/tablet still represents the best form and function as a mass market personal computer. With regard to the smartphone we must keep one thing in mind. While essential, it may always be limited by its screen size. This limitation opens up the opportunity for larger form factor computing devices. I anticipate a battle between the tablet and the PC over the next few years for the hearts and minds of mainstream consumers. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the tablet.

Tras leer a Bajarin, alguien tan respetado como el Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson también escribió una entrada al respecto:

In theory, every person on the planet could and maybe should have a smartphone. Obviously we won’t hit that number for a very long time, if ever. But the global smartphone market is much larger than the PC and tablet markets now.
Design and build for the phone. Because that’s where the users are and that is where they will be.
Update: I wrote this before getting on a bike and riding out to Brooklyn. As I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge, I realized the thing that could change this – price. If high quality (think Nexus 7) tablets get down to sub $50, that could change a lot. I would imagine every student would be issued a tablet like that at the start of the school year. They would become the default reading and watching devices. I think that can and will happen within five years. So maybe we are witnessing a temporary stalling of the tablet market while these devices wait to become affordable for everyone.

Y también ha ofrecido su punto de vista sobre el "peak iPad" MC Siegler:

As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad would be in the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500. Think about that for a second. The iPad alone is bigger than almost all Fortune 500 companies.
If the iPad is a fad, it’s the greatest fad in the history of American business.
And so I repeat: the iPad got too successful, too quickly. And everyone (including Apple) got spoiled by those insane numbers.
…
Peak iPad? We’ll see.