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  3. iPad Dominates Due to Apple’s Supple Deals Apple certainly has lots of secret weapons behind its products, but there’s a hid

iPad Dominates Due to Apple’s Supple Deals Apple certainly has lots of secret weapons behind its products, but there’s a hid

admin2012-07-05  28
问题                     iPad Dominates Due to Apple’s Supple Deals
    Apple certainly has lots of secret weapons behind its products, but there’s a hidden reason its newest iPad is likely to dominate the competition: the advantageous deals the company cuts with components manufacturers.
    Apple’s size, and the fact that the iPad shares components with the highly popular iPhone, means that the company can buy crucial parts such as processing chips and display screens at lower prices. Any company that wants to make a tablet (平板) computer that matches the iPad’s $ 499 starting price has to endure higher costs.
    As a result, Apple’s tablet-making competitors have struggled but failed. And with the new iPad, Apple is expected to extend its 62 percent market share in the tablet computer category it created. IMS Research expects Apple to capture 70 percent of the market this year.
    A year ago, more than 100 tablet models were on display at the annual consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas. Scores of companies all thought they had a shot at emulating (努力赶上) Apple’s success.
    As the year progressed, those dreams bubbled. The iPad 2 proved nearly undefeatable.
    A big part of the reason was that Apple has priced the iPad aggressively. At just under $ 500 for the basic model, Apple’s profit margin on the device is lower than on the iPhone, a smaller device for which it charges phone companies a wholesale rate of $ 600 or more.
    Apple stuck to that price point when it unveiled the new iPad model. It has a screen that displays sharper images and deeper, more vibrant colors to set it apart from the competition.
    Apple has other advantages, too. The company sells about a third of all iPads in its own stores or from its website. By cutting out the middleman, Apple is able to keep more of the slim profit margin for itself.
    According to research firm IHS iSuppli, Apple is the world’s largest buyer of the microprocessor chips that serve as the "brains" of various devices. Apple said it had spent $ 3. 9 billion on long-term contracts to secure supplies for two years of a "very strategic" component it wouldn’t name. Few other companies are able to commit that much money.
    Many suppliers are happy to sell to Apple, given the company’s success in mobile products. ARM Holdings PLC, a British chip-maker that licenses the technology used in iPhone and iPad chips, for instance , saw its stock rise nearly 4 percent a day after Apple unveiled iPads with faster processors. Other Apple suppliers, including Cirrus Logic Inc. , Jabil Circuit Inc. and Skyworks Solutions, have all experienced healthy stock gains in recent months.
    The iPad’s pricing created an odd situation. Usually, the first gadget (配件) of its kind to hit the market is expensive. Competition then gradually brings prices down.
    With the iPad, the reverse happened: Competing products from makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. were more expensive, at least for the first year.
    The most tragic example of a tablet failure is Research In Motion Ltd. , the maker of the BlackBerry.
    RIM’s co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, said interest in the planned PlayBook tablet was " really overwhelming" , particularly from corporate customers, a key market for BlackBerry phones. Just before it launched, Balsillie said the PlayBook " may well be the most significant development for RIM since the launch of the first BlackBerry device back in 1999. "
    But the PlayBook was widely panned (批评) because of its software, which RIM had put together. It was also expensive. It cost the same as an entry-level iPad 2 despite being half as big.
    When sales failed to materialize, RIM had to chop the price of the PlayBook from $ 500 to $ 200. It ended up taking a pre-tax charge of $ 485 million for the declining value of its stored products.
    Other manufacturers lowered prices too, reaching a "fire sale" during the recent holiday season, said Rhoda Alexander, an analyst who covers tablets for IHS iSuppli.
    " Those price discounts have come out of the profit margin, to a large degree," she said.
    Samsung has been one of the survivors, selling 6.1 million tablets last year, according to IHS iSuppli. That makes it the second largest tablet maker after Apple, with a market share of 9 percent compared with Apple’s 62 percent. Samsung is also one of the world’s leading makers of smartphones, chips and display screens. The company is, therefore, big enough to capture some of the advantages that Apple has as a buyer of components in bulk.
    Another successful challenger appeared: Amazon, com Inc. The Internet retailer figured out that people would buy a device other than an iPad if the price was considerably lower. Amazon doesn’t make a profit on its Kindle Fire, according to IHS iSuppli, but it hopes the device will help boost sales of movies, music and electronic books at its online store.
    Analysts estimate that Amazon sold 3.9 million to 6 million Kindle Fires in the first six weeks, making it the third-largest seller of tablets last year. Looking solely at the last three months of last year, Amazon beat Samsung as the second-largest seller of tablets.
    Barnes & Noble Inc. adopted a similar strategy and was also successful, at least considering that it’s a bookseller venturing into consumer electronics. It updated its Nook Color e-reader to make it more of a general-purpose device and called it the Nook Tablet. ISuppli estimates that it sold 3. 3 million Nook tablets last year.
    During this year’s holiday shopping season, a new raft (大批) of challengers will appear; tablets powered by Microsoft’s Windows 8. Now, the company is creating a version of Windows that runs on phone-style processors such as those used in the iPad. Reviews of the pre-production software have been positive. It will allow users to do some things they can’t on an iPad, such as running two applications side by side on the same screen.
    Still, analysts expect Apple to regain market share, after losing some because of the unsustainable discounting by competitors late last year. Last week, Apple said it would keep the iPad 2 in production and cut the starting price to $ 399—the same price as Samsung’s Galaxy Note Tab 10.1.
What strange phenomenon stemmed from the iPad’s pricing?
选项 A、The best product is sold at the lowest price.
B、Later competing products are more expensive.
C、The first product fades out of the market fast.
D、Fake products become more popular and cheaper.
答案B
解析 定位句中的an odd situation是题干中strange phenomenon的同义转述。定位句指出，通常同类产品第一批进入市场的价格高，通过竞争，价格会逐渐降下来。可是在iPad这里却发生了相反的事情：其他制造商的竞争性产品定价反而更高，故答案为B)。
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