iSuppli has torn apart the iPad and iPad 2 and done a comparative analysis of design of Apple’s two tablets to its five main competitors, the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry Playbook, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, ASUS Eee Pad Transformer and HP’s Touchpad. They looked at all of these tablets from a design standpoint and found that the non-Apple tablets can’t compete with the efficiency of Apple’s design.
iSuppli attribute Apple’s design win to their in-house design team, efficient combination of the OS with the components along side a more-efficient use of RAM. apart from the Blackberry Playbook and the HP Touchpad all the other Android Tablets are made separately with the OS being ported on top to an already designed tablets which leads to inefficiencies.
Apple designed everything to do with the tablet, it created the OS and the procssor so its actually can achieve performance equal to or better than their competitors using half the RAM. This actually save them $14 per unit in basic material costs. Apple’s ability to know in advance every component that will go into iPad hardware allows them to customize and leverage hardware to maximize performance, as well as significantly reduce costs — a factor that allowed Apple to set the bar for tablet pricing at $499. This eats into their competitors profits margins as they struggle to compete.
The iPad’s custom-designed battery allows Apple to shape the iPad for the best feel, 100g really isn’t a huge difference, the battery doesn’t dictate the design like in most tablets. Most non-Apple tablets feature a more squarish, thicker and heavier backing that feels less comfortable to hold. However, if they didn’t create such large tablets hey couldn’t have compete with even the original iPad let alone the iPad 2.
Because of the smaller size of their offerings, RIM and Samsung’s seven-inch models both rated lower “bill of materials” (raw component, or BOM) costs than any model of iPad. The seven-inch Playbook had a BOM cost of $271 with a retail price of $499, while the Galaxy Tab had a BOM cost of $262 with an original retail price of $749 (off contract). The original iPad had a BOM cost of $268, while the current model has a BOM cost of $310.
Buyers should expect the next generation tablets to make quad-core processors a standard item, likely beginning next year, the report notes. The analysis found other interesting comparisons as well, noting that only Asus and HP’s offerings incorporated the higher-quality IPS multitouch displays like the iPad uses (of the brands compared), that the iPad 2′s camera was significantly lower resolution than any of the compared tablets, and that the iPad 2′s battery was the largest capacity (6930mAh) of the models looked at in the report.
Via electronista
