We Lose Money on Every Sale, But Make it up in Volume
August 21st, 2011 - 9:30 am
Best Buy: Buy a big screen 3D television, get a free Samsung Galaxy Tab iPad clone.
I’d say neither 3D TVs not Tabs are selling very well. Whatever happened to Android taking over the market for tablets?
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0135.html
I presume this is an indirect cheer for Apple.
You might want to read this: http://dashes.com/anil/2011/08/what-theyre-protecting-us-from.html
It’s good to know the low opinion I formed of Anil Dash many, many years ago remains perfectly valid.
Yeah, I don’t really get the point of that post.
But, then, Dash is squarely in the category known as “New Media Douchebag”.
The market place is very vast, and includes many places that are not the USA. When I was in Korea (just got back last week), Android tablets outnumbered iPads by a wide margin.
Yeah, and I’m sure Android tablets (possibly including a lot of them that try very hard, in ways that’d be illegal anywhere else, to look just like an iPad) are huge in China, too.
Problem is, that leaves Apple squarely in charge in terms of both profit margin and market influence.
“But we’re huge in Korea!” is what losers have.
(Me, I kinda wish there was an actually-competitive Android tablet just to push Apple more. At least Android can compete tolerably well in the phone market, and that’s helped the iPhone significantly.
You don’t stagnate when you have to compete, after all.
That’s also true of Android – if the Android makers ever decide that they should just stick with the low-profit, low-feature, who-cares bulk market, Android’s toast, because it’ll have stopped competing.)
I think this has less to do with tablets, and more to do with 3D TVs. The key phrase here is “buyers of _certain_ HDTVs”
I suspect that ‘certain’ means last years model (or older).
I recently purchased a Samsung 55″ 3D TV at best buy (about 2 months ago). They had 3 different Samsung 55″ models there, this year’s, last year’s, and 2 yrs ago’s model. This year’s model is the thinnest, with the thinnest bezel. Previous yrs models are thicker, with chunkier bezels.
I suspect that they’re trying to get rid of prev year models, to make way for whatever they’re going to release in 2012.
Dunno, Amos. The 16Gb version runs $499 at Best Buy. Is their margin so small on the 16Gb version they’re willing to burn that off just to dump TVs?
Just for laughs, I thought I would reprint an opinion contrary to our esteemed host. I do not agree with said reprint, but felt the amusement value was worth the effort:
The Galaxy 10.1 tab is the best selling of all non-iPad tablets (along with the ASUS Transformer). (which, I admit, is somewhat like being the best-selling ketchup that’s not Heinz) I doubt that Best Buy needs to dump them like the HP touchpad.
Theory 1: they need to get rid of TVs to make room for the next model.
Theory 2: given that it’s a Samsung TV and a Samsung tablet, it may well be a Samsung sponsored promotion, to try to get people into the Samsung ecosystem. Samsung has a (pitiful) app store, for it’s devices, so if you have a Samsung TV, and a Samsung computer | tablet | phone, they can talk to each other.
Theory 3: they are getting ready to introduce a better tablet for Xmas. ASUS has already announced they will have a new version of the Transformer with an Tegra 3 chip for Xmas. Samsung has not announced this, but perhaps they’re preparing the field anyway.
(Disclosure: my job is somewhat related to this subject, but I don’t work for Samsung or Best Buy)
Android will never truly compete at the same level as Apple because quite simply, they aren’t after the same market.
IOs is close sourced and tightly restricted in every way (try developing your own application for an IPad) but it provides great security and a guarantee that you can pick up any IDevice and it will have a certain look and feel to it that you will know.
Android is open source and encourages innovation and experimentation from the operating source kernel up to its applications (ie. Wifi Hotspot was available on Android way before IPhone/IPad). But of course with this freedom comes risk. Apps do not work on all devices (Netflix for instance), no two manufactures have the same look and feel, apps can leak your information without your knowledge, etc.
Thus:
Android – Freedom at the cost of Consistency, great for developers who need the freedom, not so great for meeting expectations
IPad – Consistency at the cost of Freedom, great for mainstream consumers (much larger market) and the “I just want it to work” crowd