Yeah, you're probably right here. At $200-250 though, they would still be priced lower than any big brand names making tablets, regardless of OS. That alone would have sparked demand. Would it have been as explosive as it was? No, but they also wouldn't have lost as much money and might have avoided the potential doom to the platform.
HP has set the bar pretty low for tablet pricing. All these new Touchpad owners now have $99 in their head, and when it comes time to upgrade, they will probably walk away from the more expensive options.
Personally, I don't think there is a tablet market, just an iPad market, and a big part of that has been price. Only Apple is Apple, and nobody else can demand that kind of money for what is essentially a toy and get away with it on the scale they can, for various reasons. Had HP set the bar at $200-250, they could have made the sales they were hoping to make, lost less money and still potentially make money on future, cheaper to produce hardware; or at least left that door open for another company to license their OS and do so. Nobody can make money at $99 without some huge profit margins from something else, and I don't think the tablet market has that something else (yet). Now, a lot of tablet consumers have that $99 price in their head, and it's going to be a hard sell getting them to spend more in the future.
Consider this as well:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/hp-single-handedly-destro...
HP has set the bar pretty low for tablet pricing. All these new Touchpad owners now have $99 in their head, and when it comes time to upgrade, they will probably walk away from the more expensive options.
Personally, I don't think there is a tablet market, just an iPad market, and a big part of that has been price. Only Apple is Apple, and nobody else can demand that kind of money for what is essentially a toy and get away with it on the scale they can, for various reasons. Had HP set the bar at $200-250, they could have made the sales they were hoping to make, lost less money and still potentially make money on future, cheaper to produce hardware; or at least left that door open for another company to license their OS and do so. Nobody can make money at $99 without some huge profit margins from something else, and I don't think the tablet market has that something else (yet). Now, a lot of tablet consumers have that $99 price in their head, and it's going to be a hard sell getting them to spend more in the future.