(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.
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