Thursday, March 8, 2012

Will new iPad keep Apple from dropping? The iPad3

 (philstar.com) Updated March 08, 2012 11:22 AM
SAN FRANCISCO (Xinhua) -- Apple Inc. on Wednesday unveiled the much-anticipated third-generation iPad. In a so-called "post-PC world" when the tablet computer market is divided as iPad and non-iPad, many are wondering whether the new device can defend Apple's dominance and keep one of the world's most valuable companies from slowing down.
     
When unveiling the new iPad, Apple's Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook noted the industry is in a post-PC revolution and Apple has "feet firmly planted in the post-PC future."
     
Cook said that Apple is fortunate to have three post-PC products, namely iPod, iPhone and the iPad, which make up 76 percent of Apple's revenues last year. Called the "poster child of the post-PC world", a total of 15.4 million units of iPad were sold during the fourth quarter of 2011, which overtops personal computer units from any major manufacturers such as HP, Lenovo, Dell and Acer.
     
Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst of market research firm Forrester Research, told Xinhua in a phone interview that she thinks the new iPad is a "truly impressive feat of engineering", noting the new tablet will raise the bars for Apple's counterparts to compete both in the hardware and software side.
     
Running on a faster A5X chip and 4G network, the new iPad also got app updates, such as iPhoto, to deliver the performance of sharper Retina Display, which has 1 million more pixels than a large-screen HDTV.
     
Along with HD video recording, dictation input and other new features, the new iPad will "enhance the consumer experience in a significant way," Epps said.
     
To fight rivals like Amazon which use lower-prices tablets to encroach on iPad's share, Apple chooses to keep the iPad2 in its product line with a 100-U.S.-dollar price reduction. The 16GB and WiFi-only iPad 2 is now 399 dollars.
     
Statistics and forecasts are quite bright for Apple and the new iPad. Forrester Research said 65 percent of all touchscreen tablets in use at work in the United States are iPads. According to IMS Research, another research firm, Apple dominated the global tablet market with a 62 percent market share last year and the number is forecast to increase to 70 percent in 2012.
     
"There is a large customer base loyal to Apple products that have been waiting for the latest tablet. Many owners of the iPad 1 are also expected to upgrade to the latest release. In addition to this consumer demand, growth is also forecast as a result of sales into enterprise and education," said IMS Research.
     
Meanwhile, some competitors have come to a sobering evaluation of their performances in the market, admitting that their attempt to grab the tablet share has largely been a flop.
     
"Honestly, we're not doing very well in the tablet market," Hankil Yoon, a product strategy executive for Samsung, said last Monday during a media roundtable at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
     
However, not all industry watchers are quite impressed by the new generation iPad. Rob Enderle, a veteran analyst in Silicon Valley, said Apple vowed to achieve things Steve Jobs hadn't finished, but it didn't. The new iPad "is over-promising," he told Xinhua in a phone interview.
     
He said the problem for the new iPad is it cannot embrace all new product benchmarks by increasing the depth of the line and significantly improving the hardware. He noted that some of the new device's improved performance depends on the 4G network which is not quite popular and mature for the moment in the United States.
     
Last month, James B. Stewart of The New York Times said in an article that it's just a matter of time before Apple's growth confronts the law of large numbers which suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow down as the companies grow larger.
     
Some companies have been felled by the law. Cisco Systems hit a market capitalization of 557 billion dollars at the peak of technology bubble in March 2000, but its capitalization is currently around 100 billion dollars, down by 80 percent since then.
     
As many analysts and reporters said Apple's innovation has been incremental, Epps, the analyst, pointed out that the new iPad is "a gut renovation masquerades as incremental innovation," and the formula for Apple's success is the company designs its products for its customers.
     
She said customers will wait in line at an Apple Store to buy the new iPad that is designed for customers, not the press.
     
"We expect that the new iPad will sell even more units than the previous version has," she told Xinhua. 

No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails




bangsar south bangsar south bangsar south bangsar south bangsar south couple sex couple sex couple sex couple sex couple sex balcony balcony balcony balcony balcony balcony video video video video video video sex sex sex sex sex sex sex jho low 1mdb jho low 1mdb jho low 1mdb jho low 1mdb jho low 1mdb jho low 1mdb jho low