[DaFace]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

Here is a great report on the smartphone market ... if you carry it to it's logical conclusion it could apply to the tablet market as well...

http://www.businessinsider.com/andro...t-share-2011-4

Heh....

Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought--and lost--in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are "better," but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers (Windows in the 1990s, Android now).

Ya don't say. This is valid, however:

As we explain here, two important things are different about the current Android - iPhone battle than the Mac - Windows war in the 1990s. First, Apple is maintaining price parity (or better) with the leading Android phones. (Macs always cost more than PCs). Second, Android is still a fragmented platform, which significantly reduces the benefits of "interoperability" across multiple manufacturers.