[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by MikeOnyx

I'm also curious to get your opinion on why you think the iSlate will take over? Do you believe that the Brand alone will be much more important than the price and will make everyone pay that much more to have the device? What about the iSlate do you believe will give it the competitive edge that other eReaders will not?

Content, distribution, and capability.

It will be able to do everything all the other readers are trying to do but cannot because of the limitations of e-ink refresh rates and lack of color. You make all the correct points about backlighting, etc., but while all those things sound great on paper (har!), none of those reasons are going to matter in the real marketplace. It's analogous to the whole ePub format standard debacle of the last few years. The vast majority of people accept a ridiculously infantile typesetting model for their multi-hundred dollar devices: a model that renders text on that nice, pretty screen in a way that would make professional typesetters run screaming for the hills, simply because the vast majority of people (even bibliophiles such as populate boards like this, surprisingly enough) obviously don't give a flying rat's ass about good typesetting. Likewise, LCD vs. e-Ink isn't going to mean anything realistic to most people.

What will mean something to everyone who is going to buy one of these things over a dedicated e-Ink reader is that

1. it is made by Apple and will have the "cool" factor
2. it will have artistically beautiful construction design that will make everything else on the ereader market look like something developed by a sloven gang of junior-high-school kids in a single afternoon
3. it will be able to surf the complete Internet, certainly via WiFi, and possibly through 3G as well
4. it will be a gaming platform, a movie player, a music player, a photo viewer, and possibly give access to productivity tools like iWork as well
5. because it will probably have the same audio jack that will accept a combo mic/earphone set, you'll be able to install the Skype applet and use the damn thing to make phone calls for practically free - try doing that with your Kindle!
6. and lastly, and most importantly to the e-reader market: Apple is going to line up distribution deals directly with the publishers, which will simply mean that within the next couple of years, Apple will vault in one giant leap to being the largest single distributor of ebooks on the market, because every book publisher on the planet is going to be motivated to do a deal with Apple to get their books into the iTunes distribution chain in a way that Amazon with the Kindle just can't match. Itunes will be a single-point distributor of just about every kind of electronic media imaginable, and the tablet will be able to use every one of them, not just the books. You can't beat that kind of marketing potential. It's just going to swamp the ebook market completely.

Now, you take your average consumer and give him the choice of buying this tablet or buying a severely limited capability black and white device that can basically only present text to him, and which device do you think he's going to buy? Given the economy the way it is, how many people do you really think are going to shell out hundreds of dollars for an electronic book plus another wad of hundreds of dollars for a tablet? I'm guessing not very many people have that kind of disposable cash lying around, so if they're in the market for a reader, they're only going to buy one device, and any half-wit could predict what the vast majority of Joe Consumers are going to pick given the choice.

The Apple tablet is going to effectively end the business model of all the niche players in this field: Plastic Logic and Skiff, if they are successful at marketing their devices to business professionals, may find a tiny little corner of the market to sell several thousand units each, but not much more than that. The other little players in the ereader field such as B&N, iRex, etc., are just going to quietly vanish within a couple of years. Sony and Amazon might be able to still make their product sell just because of name recognition, but only if their prices are low enough - a $400 ereader is never going to sell next to Apple's tablet, and I'm not even sure Sony's readers will be able to survive, because in the end, the entire question of who is going to win this market war is not going to be who has e-Ink versus who has LCD: it's all going to come down to dominance of the media content. iTunes will have an effective lock on that within just a few years, thus Apple wins. It's as simple as that. All the minor-niche people who yammer on about e-ink versus LCD are picking the wrong battle: none of that matters, because most people simply aren't going to care - what they will care about is "cool", brand, content availability, and functionality. Nothing out there in the e-ink market will be able to touch Apple on any of these fronts, thus the battle is already lost. I predict that for the vast majority of typical consumers, this tablet device is going to make even having a laptop a bit superfluous, especially if it can do basic word processing through iWork.

Anyway, I know most people reading this are going to scream and slaver and gnash their teeth about how you'd have to pry their e-ink reader out of their cold, dead hands and yadda, yadda, yadda. Meaningless noise, basically. If this product launch were being done by Microsoft, I'd be a little more cautious about saying the war is lost. But this is Apple and the corporate business leadership genius behind it is Jobs. Lock, stock, and barrel.