Comment by stickmunch
2 days ago
Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard.
Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
Indeed, "iPad" is almost a generic term for "tablet," especially for kids.
Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.
That would be what is referred to as a market for lemons.
Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.
That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.
>You rarely ever saw them in the wild.
Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.
UPS uses what are called DIADS made by Honeywell. I've seen Fedex and Amazon use regular android phones as far as I'm aware.
OK, but the topic is tablets before the introduction of the iPad
> Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard
Oh yeah, that's been awesome for the consumer.
Consumer wasn't mentioned.
Oh, please. That's clearly the context being discussed.