80% off: HP TouchPad $99 garbage sale revives scorned tablet too late

[redred]

The HP TouchPad was such a short-lived disaster that it’s reduced Hewlett Packard back down to being a printer company, just as the TouchPad’s webOS predecessor the Palm Pre was such a disaster that it ended Palm’s existence. At a time when tablets are so hot that Apple has sold thirty million iPad and iPad 2 models before most of the mainstream has even fully figured out what to use a tablet for, and when companies like Samsung can almost literally take an iPad shell and slap a cobbled operating system like Android on it and sell it at a respectable clip, it’s nothing short of stunning that HP couldn’t make a go of it with the TouchPad in any way, shape, or form. So how is it that, once the TouchPad was canceled, it suddenly sold so much more strongly? Simple: nearly all products, even failed ones, tend to fly off the shelf once discounted by eighty percent.

It’s not unlike the old furniture store which sees sales slow so badly that it decides to close down, but not before blowing out the remaining inventory at thirty, then, fifty, then eighty percent off. Suddenly the store is full of customers and sees the kind of business it never did when it was still trying to stay in business. But any hopes on the part of the failed store owner are immediately dashed once it’s realized that the sales resurgence is only because the remaining units are being given away for less than they cost to build in the first place. The post-facto sales boom on the remaining TouchPad inventory, then, has nothing to with HP brand equity or any sudden interest in the webOS operating system, which despite universal geek praise has been a humiliating consumer bust going back to the days when webOS destroyed Palm. Why HP thought it could do better by acquiring Palm and launching products like the TouchPad and Palm 3 with the same failed webOS operating system, the one which the public had already so thoroughly rejected, is something only HP’s execs can answer. But one thing is clear: it doesn’t matter. $99 TouchPad sales have no significance, there’s nothing to be read into it, and it’s certainly not going to cause the TouchPad to be magically brought back to life, and for one simple reason…

There’s no way HP can sustainably sell the TouchPad for ninety-nine dollars or even double that. The cost of the hardware components adds up to more than that, and that’s before you factor in the cost of labor and in-house operating system development. But that won’t change the fact that headline after geek-penned headline is proclaiming that the TouchPad “resurrection” means that the iPad is vulnerable. After all, these are the same geeks who opined that the iPad was the worst thing to ever happen to technology when it was introduced back in 2010. In criticizing the iPad for not being “open” enough (by which they meant “hackable enough”), they saw the iPad as taking personal computing in a consumer-friendly, ease-of-use prioritized direction with which they didn’t identify. It’s why they’ve been promoting Android-based tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as iPad alternatives; unlike the iPad, the Android operating system is hacker-friendly…

But it’s been a bad stretch for Samsung’s tablet line, as the company so blatantly copycatted the iPad hardware design that Apple’s lawyers have managed to get the Tab removed from store shelves in various regions and nations, with yet another national government ruling today that the Tab 10.1 is stolen property and therefore banished. With the primary Android tablet maker now facing such legal pressure that it might be compelled to bail out of the Android and/or tablet space entirely (particularly with the upcoming lawsuits over the Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone, whose design appears stolen from Apple’s iPhone 4), the geeks are busy looking for another tablet to champion. Too bad for them, the HP TouchPad, whose sales were so awful that HP discontinued it after a mere seven weeks of no one wanting one at full price or even sizable discounts, proved to only be popular once it was marked down to eighty percent off in a fire sale. Even as geek headline writers attempt to spin the demise of the HP TouchPad as the start of a new geek-leaning tablet revolution, the reality is that the TouchPad was such a failure that HP couldn’t even have given it away at half price.

[Godfather]

I almost bought one just in the spur of the moment Thankfully they sold out before I could waste 100$ on a knee-jerk


But with webOS dead, you're buying a temporary device that won't even be good for surfing the net shortly... I guess some nerds could develop third party software and keep it alive, but they'd need development tools and I just don't think it's going to happen.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

webOS is being supported by MS (i dont know why) And there is a group who will have android working on it soon.


*edit*

Looks like its out all ready

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/25/a...-yours-on-eba/

[Godfather]

Damn. That would be worth $99 actually...

[PorkChopSandwiches]

Yeah it would

[Lambchop]

Sold out pretty fast.