A fight is brewing among tablet makers, but Apple is sitting this one out, their fists stuffed with cash. Rivals, stuck with too many units and too few buyers are likely to start a price war, competing to see how long can they go, according to a Tuesday report.
The problem stems from “weaker sales than their order volumes” amid tepid consumer demand for tablets not bearing the Apple logo, says industry publication DigiTimes. The downward price spiral is expected to start at the end of September in order to “digest inventory and minimize losses.” By the all-important holiday period, non-Apple tablets could be selling as low as $350. The iPad 2, by comparison, is flying off shelves at $499.
In one instance, Asustek shipped 700,000 tablets, selling only 500,000 devices. Elsewhere. soon after HP shipped its TouchPad, the company slashed $100 off the price, turning a temporary discount into a permanent reduction. In another case, Acer has cut orders faced with slow demand.
The question becomes how low must iPad rivals drop prices before consumers will pick up an Android tablet? Next stop: the discount bin, next to the left-over floppy discs and zip drives.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
19 responses to “iPad Rivals Slashing Tablet Prices Just to Get ‘Em Off The Shelves”
I’m sorry. It’s complete B.S.
Well, its not telling the whole story.
Don’t know if this plays a factor, but apparently amazon tablets will be available in late august/early september and rumor has it price wise, they will significantly undercut the completion.
Another thing is, Asus is rolling out a new tablet in October (transformer “2”) and rumors has it that Xoom will unveil the xoom 2 at that time. Basically next generation android tablets should be on the market in October.So, first, if amazon is going to heavily undercut the compeition price wise, won’t other companies drop their prices to compete? And secondly, if New android tablets are coming in october, aren’t they going to slash the prices of the android tablets to have them cleared off the shelves before the new one comes in? Even apple slashed the prices on their ipad (1) to make room for the iPad 2.
Since Amazon has other businesses, it’s willing to subsidize the cost of its tablets so you can buy stuff from their stores. Other tablet makers don’t have that luxury.
It’s easier for a service provider to get into hardware than the other way around, because in the former case, they already have your credit card info.
Meaning all supply still in the chain will get burnt off to clear shelves for the new releases (retail 101). What part of the story isn’t clear? NONE of these companies are making any money off of these things & soon they’ll have to take a lose. The real point of this article is to point out that NO one wants these things to begin with because there is NO tablet market. There’s an iPad market! That’s it!
Maybe consumers are getting smarter. The Android tablet vendors will find out that they can’t force junk on consumers at any price. The Android tablet market is too fragmented. Consumers will be better off staying with a trusted company, Apple as every app works on every iPad so there’s no guessing. Customer support will be a more consistent experience since a consumer can go to any Apple retail store and get their device fixed or replaced with little hassle.
I think it’ll only be a matter of time before Android tablet vendors realize that they’re losing money and gaining very little for their efforts. They’ll just decide to get out of the tablet business for good and that will be the end of Android tablets for the most part. There will still be those smaller Android tablet vendors selling second-rate tablets for $200 catching unsuspecting consumers off-guard but they’ll never get repeat buyers.
Apple just needs to keep pumping out iPads by the tens of millions and pretty soon most consumers will forget their was any other type of tablet on the market. I’m anxious to see this so-called Amazon wonder tablet that’s supposed to kill the iPad. It seems more like wishful thinking from Android fanbois than a legitimate threat. Let’s see if Jeff Bezos really is smarter than Steve Jobs when it comes to selling hardware. I doubt it, but Amazon does seem to have an awful lot of luck when it comes to impressing Wall Street.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
Oh yeah! Just wait until the next (whatever) tablet arrives, it blow the socks off the iPad!
More vapor-tablet-ware… just like it has been for the last year and a half.
I bought my Galaxy Tab 10.1 at full price after having owned an iPad. I got tired of seeing empty white space where Flash content should have been. Now I can see the whole WWW!
And if you only want to see flash content your pick was excellent. On the other hand, i like to make a thousand more things in the iPad han just surf on the WWW
Xoom only came out this year. If they have to launch a gen 2 product this soon, you know it’s not looking good.
Well about everyone is/will be releasing a new tablet, so, why not a new Xoom?
If Amazon is going to release tablets, and Asus is going to make a transformer 2 for this fall, why not a Xoom 2? Matter of fact, rumors had it that Apple was going to release an iPad 3 this fall!
So, is that (really) a problem? And last I checked, the Xoom came out early this year (Feburary ish…?)