The Power of iPad

Some fascinating facts and figures about the iPad.

The iPad 2 has gotten good reviews, and it's easy to see why: Thinner, lighter, faster, with cameras, and at the same price as the old one. What's not to like? Still, we saw a flood of Android tablets being shown at CES... why haven't we seen them yet? Wait, the Xoom is finally hitting the stores... but it seems to be more expensive than the equivalent iPad. What's up with that?

Apple is being clever, that's why. Apple's sneaky strategy is using its $60 billion in cash to buy up displays, forcing other tablet makers to delay release or pay a lot more, thus raising the competition's prices. Apple has reportedly bought up over 60% of all factory capacity for touchscreen displays... and laid out wads of cash (over $4 billion) to do so.

Talk about a win-win... Apple secures production capacity for their projected needs for years ahead, and at the same time forcing competitors to either build new factories, pay significantly higher prices, or accept inferior quality. No wonder the competition doesn't look so good yet.

I expect that Apple will maintain their market share pretty well; they're likely to be constrained more by how many they can build, than by the competition. Android tablets will be here by summer in droves, more than likely (and HP's WebOS tablet, too), just in time for a rumored iPad 3 launch in September or October so Apple can regain the high ground... it's going to be an interesting year.