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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Full Disclosure: I bought an iPad 2 days ago.

Interesting perspective: 2 million iPads in 60 days is roughly 33K/day. Google is activating 3x as many Android phones per day (and presumably growing).

An Android phone != an iPad but it makes you wonder what sales numbers will look like when we start seeing Dell tablets running Android (along with the other 5 big PC manufacturers)

As usual Apple has a huge head start, and like with the iPhone will have a 2nd generation iPad device out by the time we see any credible Android competition.

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1 Company selling 1 model is very different then 20 companies selling 40 different models with 5 different versions of OS.(and 20 different skins)

Nokia sell something like 1.5 million phones a day afaik.

The only difference is that Nokia isn't as wide spread in the US as it is in Europe and Middle East. Plus Nokia targets simple users ($100 phones) while Apple and Google (SmartPhone) targets users ready to put $500+ on a phone or a tablet. So Nokia will have a much larger audience.

Right. There are two discussions to have here.

Company Success: Apple is clearly successful with those sales #s.

OS Success: It remains to be seen if the ugly/fragmented OS being sold by 20 different companies will kick the ass of the prettier/walled-garden OS sold by one company like it did with Computer OS's. If it does, it'd be sad to see it happen to Apple a second time.

I'd personally prefer to see Apple license the heck out of their OS's with stringent hardware requirements.

I'd be happy if they just made it legal to license it for use in an emulator. That would cover 99% of the use cases I have for running either of their os's (iPhone OS, OS X) on non-apple hardware.

I expect many people to have multiple tablets, possibly of various makes and sizes. A simple glass panel with a touch screen will be commoditized quickly. At least among geeks. Heck I'm already using my iPad as an adjunct monitor on my laptop. Imagine a few years from now when we've started to push what these things can do. The old Star Trek trope where a person has a bunch of tablet-like devices spread out on their desk, like stacks of paper, may be hear sooner than we think.

The real question is which tablets will support an active and innovative eco-system that _normal_ people will use, trust and pay to run apps on.

We all hope that one of those tablets offers a spell and sense check.

Costs for tablets will certainly spiral as manufacturing is so simple and Android is free to the OEMs. Tough comparing to iPad to Android #'s b/c everyone needs a cell phone and their lifecycle is about 1.5 years.

There are about 75 million netbooks sold every year. Let's guess that the tablet market is 100mm at peak. Apple will be pretty happy owning the top 20% segment of that market. That is where all of the margin is at.

The Android tablets will probably have razor thin margins with Google trying to make money on the advertising and Google Apps aimed at enterprises.

100% of the iPad profits go to Apple. How much of the profits go to each individual Android licensee?

That question would make sense if google were in it for the licenses.

It was in answer to the earlier post mentioning 100K Android devices shipped on a daily basis. Whereas Google makes no money from each Android device sold and in fact bears the cost of developing Android, Apple on the other hand is recovering its development/marketing expenses and takes all the profit from sales of the iPad.

How many Google ad impressions does a consumer need to see before the payoff is the same as that from selling an iPad? Or... how much is your personal data worth to you? To Google?

It's not a matter of how many ads need to be clicked to pay for the phone, it's about gaining mindshare, more searches, more people using gmail, mobile google maps ubiquity and so on. I have no idea how they could even measure revenue gained by Android use accurately, or even on what timescale they expect to really start benefiting from it, but you can be sure it's going to be huge in a few years.

If that's the kind of statistic that you're going to use, then count iPhones and iPod touches along with that if all we're looking at are devices running a certain OS.

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