So I Bought a Kindle Fire

This.

The kind of person who is willing and can afford to pay $200-300 extra for smoother scrolling on an iPadX is pretty much by definition not the kind of person the Kindle Fire is targetted at. I am pretty sure that when (not if) Amazon release a 10" Kindle Fire, it will outsell the iPad(s) within a fairly short time.

This sample of one disagrees. The only reason I purchased the Fire is that it is seven inches and in an Amazon eco-system. I looked at other seven inch tablets and passed because I wasn’t sure about the eco-system. I am less price sensitive (since I own both iPad2 and Fire), so I may be an outlier. I will not be purchasing a larger Fire.

See, I disagree with all of this. I think the 10 Kindle will crater. And I think a smaller, lighter iPad that would also be cheaper (due to it being smaller) but with Apple quality would kill. The regular iPad is too big and heavy to easily carry around and too expensive to have snatched on the subway, while the iPhone is too small to comfortably use to read.

Obviously some people prefer 7" tablets or they wouldn’t exist, but price is always the most compelling differentiator among similar products made by trusted companies. If/when there’s a 10" Fire and a 7" iPad, the Fires will still be cheaper and less powerful, and therefore they’ll have a much wider potential market and probably they’ll outsell both sizes of iPad. Amazon will sell them at a loss or close to it and make money from content purchases, and Apple will retain their massive profit margins and still do very well despite losing tons of market share, just like they’d done with all of their other devices not named iPod.

Obviously some people prefer 7" tablets or they wouldn’t exist, but price is always the most compelling differentiator among similar products made by trusted companies. If/when there’s a 10" Fire and a 7" iPad, the Fires will still be cheaper and less powerful, and therefore they’ll have a much wider potential market and probably they’ll outsell both sizes of iPad. Amazon will sell them at a loss or close to it and make money from content purchases, and Apple will retain their massive profit margins and still do very well despite losing tons of market share, just like they’ve done with all of their other devices not named iPod.

There were also people who thought the 7" Kindle Fire would crater.

And I think a smaller, lighter iPad that would also be cheaper (due to it being smaller) but with Apple quality would kill. The regular iPad is too big and heavy to easily carry around and too expensive to have snatched on the subway, while the iPhone is too small to comfortably use to read.

Which is pretty much the point. The very fact that you’d be willing to pay $100 extra for something “with Apple quality” puts you outside the demographic that Amazon are actually targetting.

The market share that IS price sensitive hugely outnumbers that part of the market which isn’t.

I think people aren’t giving enough credit to the fact that the Fire (at seven inches) nicely translates into a tablet for people that want just a bit more from their Kindle devices. There is no competition from Apple in that form factor and a lot of people like using Kindles that are about the same size as the Fire.

At 10 inches, the Fire directly enters iPad country and there can be more very direct comparisons between the two devices. It looks as if the Fire 10 inch may not be better than the iPad2 performance-wise, let alone what an iPad3 will bring in February. So I don’t think the outcome in a larger Fire vs. iPad battle is as clear as some are trying to make it. Someone like me is saving up for an iPad3 as opposed to a Fire. Given iPad sales, I think there are quite a few people like me out there that aren’t really seriously considering a 10 inch Fire.

But I could be very wrong!

No, you’re right, you’re just missing the point. A 10" Fire is not designed to pull of people who buy iPads currently–I’m sure it will get some relatively small portion of them, but that’s not the point of it. The point of the 10" Fire will be to sell tablets to people who don’t want to spend six hundred bucks on a tablet. It’ll be for people who were never going to spend the money on an iPad anyway.

So yes, I think the outcome is pretty clear: both will be very successful.

This is me. I’m waiting for the 10" Fire. I haven’t bought an iPad because, for the money, I don’t have many uses for one. Spending $6-700 (no-one buys the bottom of the line iPad) on a tablet to watch movies when I travel (three times a year) and reading a few comics every month would feel rather decadently profligate. I already have a Kindle for reading, and I’m perfectly happy with that.

$299 for a 10" Fire would be right about what I want to spend for a tablet with very limited use cases. My guess is I’m not alone.

Kindles and Nooks aren’t 9.7 inch displays.

I’ve used a Nook Color, which is about the same size as a Fire, and I guess because I use reading glasses now I can have it on the smallest font size and read it easily. I get a LOT of text on one display page, maybe more than I’d get in a print book.

I think a smaller iPad would go over well because it would fit in smaller purses and men could carry it in pockets.

I believe Apple calls the smaller iPad an ‘iPod Touch’.</snark>

I think you are forgetting that the Samsung Tab and many other 7" Android tablets have existed for a long time prior to the Kindle Fire. In fact, for a long time, 7" was your only option if you were out looking for an Android tablet. None of them have even remotely approached iPad levels of sales - something Kindle Fire has achieved, despite not (really) being available for worldwide sale.

Yeah, but this is the Internet, so I can just declare you “wrong.” :)

Yeah, but this is the Internet, so I can just declare you “wrong.” :)

Yeah, but there’s no 7" iPod.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Fire cut into the iPod’s sales. They’re close in price but if you want to play games and watch movies the Fire’s bigger screen has to enhance those experiences.

I didn’t purchase an Android tablet because of the echo system and the relative lack of support for tablet apps that were native tablet apps. I don’t have that problem with the Fire and that is why I purchased it. So yea, in theory there’s been seven inch tablets, but they just haven’t been that attractive until now.

But that’s silly. There are essentially zero apps that are “native tablet apps” for the Fire that aren’t also available for the Samsung Tab 7 or whatever. Its app availability is basically a pure subset of what you could install on any other 7" tablet.

What’s the echo system?

To be fair, many of the major attempts at 7 inch tablets prior to the Fire were either stupidly overpriced (Playbook, first Galaxy Tab), or shitty Chinese budget tablets.

Oh, right, I can see lots of reasons to buy the Fire as your first tablet. (It’s $200!) But “it has more apps than other Android tablets” is not one of them.

My suspicion is that people who’ve gotten the Kindle Fire are finding plenty of apps that work very well with it, and are contrasting that to the common “Android tablets have no software” message without realizing that they’re using a subset of the Android apps out there already.