Now that it has emerged that Intel's mobile chip division has lost $7 billion as it subsidised the manufacturing costs of Android Atom tablets, the Tame Apple Press is over the moon claiming that it will make it difficult for Apple rivals to dump cheap tablets into the market. However they are assuming that people were dumping many Atom tablets into the market, which simply isn't the case, Apple’s main rivals rely on ARM-based processors and Intel's market share is tiny.
But what the Tame Apple Press is noticing is that there are fire sales of flopped tablets HP TouchPad, BlackBerry PlayBook, Motorola Xoom, Dell Streak, Microsoft Surface, Cisco Cius, HTC Flyer, Google Nexus and Amazon Kindle Fire. While Intel has been spending billions to flood the market with cheap Android tablets using its Atom processor, these supposedly cheap tablets failed - but they weren't Intel tablets.
The Tame Apple Press has being saying all this is a foul. Intel should not be allowed to upset Apple’s monopoly by paying netbook and tablet manufacturers to switch from ARM-based application processors to its own x86 chipsets. That is not right either. In fact, the market needed a rival to ARM and Apple. It was hoped that Intel and AMD would eventually enter the market with x86 parts of their own, but so far the tablet space is dominated by ARM-based processors (including Apple's) and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
However, the elephant in the room is that Intel failed in its job and the market is not being flooded with rivals to Apple, but with cheap tablets which do pretty much the same sort of thing. We are not seeing a return to a Wintel alliance, but an Apple empire being overrun by small barbarian copycats. In fact had Intel succeeded in its plans, it might have propped up the expensive tablet market, something that Apple would have benefited from. Instead, what we are seeing is the tablet fad dying with punters buying cheap tablets or top of the range models from Apple and Samsung. It appears that people are finally working out that they can do everything that their tablet does on their smartphones.
There never was a killer app for tablets and the whole thing is slowly falling back to the default status of specialised devices that Microsoft ran, rather unsuccessfully, for decades. The tablet fiasco proved that without a killer app, subsidies are quite pointless. Tablets are essentially taking two divergent routes – very cheap, commoditised devices and premium devices like the iPad Air 2, Nexus 9 or any of a number of Samsung tablets. Intel is not in premium tablets yet and to get into the cheap ones it had to burn billions.
