Mobile Computing News

Photo: Apple

The iPad still dominates public conversation, where the mere sight of pulling one out still draws ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and leaves people gushing. It also dominates the media with people fussing over what it all means.

More importantly, the iPad dominates sales, with PC World writing an intriguing piece on how the iPad’s early success is already killing the iPad killers before they even arrive.

Sale explosion

The iPad sold an impressive 3.27 million units in its first quarter of official tracking. Analysts now forecast the Apple device will move over 13 million units this year alone. Naturally, this is great news for Apple, and equally good news for its component providers, to an extent.

Sales explosion = components shortage

LG, who manufacture the impressive screen on the iPad, recently announced that they were struggling to keep up with demand for the Apple tablet PC. Kwong Youn-soo, LG Display CEO, recently said: ‘Demand (from Apple) keeps growing and we can’t meet it all. Apple may have to delay launches of the iPad for some countries due to tight component supplies and strong demand.

‘We are considering increasing production lines for iPad products but overall supply is likely to remain tight until early next year.’

Not only are tablet PC displays being produced at a pace that cannot keep up with iPad demand, the same problem is being experienced in the SSD components space, too, leading to companies like SanDisk building new factories to try stay ahead of the curve.

So what if components are locked up?

Photo: Apple

What you need to understand is that if there aren’t enough components for Apple, there likely aren’t any components for anybody. The needs for a tablet PC are highly specific, so much so that there are very few components manufacturers to choose from. Resultantly, components manufacturers produce for whomever they have really good relationships with, or whoever is the sure bet for repeat sales purposes. The iPad, right now, is the sure bet.

How then will everybody who is yet to get a foothold in this space going get that foothold if they don’t have the raw tablet PC parts they need to even give it a go?

The PC World article makes for interesting reading and is well worth checking out.