Interestingly, labor costs in Brazil are much higher than in China. The fiscal incentives for locally assembled equipment make all the difference in the pricing for sales to the domestic market, though.
Brazil is currently the 5th largest market for personal computers in the World and has thus attracted many Japonese, Taiwanese and Korean manufacturers that now have factories in the country.
Netbook manufacturers gave up Linux too easily. I originally got my with Linux and only replaced it with Windows because I needed to write about a Windows-only software.
Just as is currently the case with the iPad, I think most early adopters of netbooks didn't really care that they were on a different OS. They just cared that they could browse, email, use social networks, etc.
I don't imagine that Apple will ever "substitute" OS X with a mobile OS on the Macs. I believe that Apple will embed the functionality of the mobile OS in the hardware/software combination that is the Mac.
Jake Humphrey has been lugging an iPad around during the BBC coverage of F1 since they were released. It's fairly prominent and I was wondering if Apple put it there.
if it's on the BBC there's no way Apple put it there. There are very strict rules about that. Is the Apple logo even visible? They'll usually blank it out.
I have never seen the logo as he's usually holding it in such a way that it's not visible but it's clearly and iPad. They may have put a silver "sticker" over the Apple logo on the back.
It is a question of comparing bananas with bananas and apples with apples. (No pun intended.)
Android is growing as other manufacturers switch their OS to it. These same manufacturers are loosing market share to Apple. Android will continue to grow until all manufacturers that don't have their own viable OS have migrated. How much market share these manufacturers will hold in the future against Apple and Blackberry (perhaps HP in the future?) is the real question.
No one manufacturer may top Apple individually, and it won't matter. The precise reason Android will grossly outsell iPhone in time is that it will have the collective R&D and marketing and carrier biz-dev of every major manufacturer but one.
It's a perfect repeat of what happened in home computing and it will end the same way. And just like there, Apple won't be too pissed because they'll still make a fortune. Owning the high-end 5% of a market is sometimes as good as (or better than) being the dominant force in the other 95%.
Well, right now there better be more books selling for the Kindle then for the iPad. :-)
The Kindle is a single purpose device that has been on the market for a couple of years and every single one of them was sold to a person who is a regular reader, otherwise they would not have bothered buying a reading device.
You might be right but that doesn't count the 50 or 60 books I've read on my iPod and I can transfer to the iPad without purchasing anything or downloading anything.
It is to early to estimate how much the iPad will be used for reading based on the number of downloads. Too short a period of time to gather meaningful data.
You could say that, but the fact is that it was my feeling of stragenss with the iPad / netbook comparison I mentioned in another comment here that got me to thinking about this.
The netbook has 8 times more memory, but can't play movies as well as the iPad can. So comparing such a basic spec isn't meaningful any more.
While those points might still seem relevant, I'm sure that they really are. Take the iPad as an example. With it's puny amount of memory it plays 720p movies perfectly which my netbook with 8 times doesn't.
Simply comparing these things directly isn't so meaningful anymore.
Brazil is currently the 5th largest market for personal computers in the World and has thus attracted many Japonese, Taiwanese and Korean manufacturers that now have factories in the country.