Should PC Makers Bow Out of the Tablet Market?

Posted 11/17/2011 at 10:51am | by Paul Lilly

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Computer system builders like Hewlett-Packard and Dell may look to pull out of the tablet market now that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble cannonballed the shallow end of the pool. Over in the deep end is Apple with its full-size (9.7-inch) iPad line, the only one that seems to be able to stay afloat at the $500 mark and above. Is it worth trying to compete anymore?

That's the question PC makers have to answer, and according to DigiTimes, those who are entrenched in the upstream supply chain believe many players will begin to pull out. Hewlett-Packard, which recently ditched the TouchPad, was one of the PC makers mentioned by DigiTimes' sources, and so were Acer, Asus, and Dell.

The challenge PC makers now face is going up against three players with strong content support. Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble all three have a robust content platform in place to go along with their hardware, and that's tough to compete with. And two of the three -- Amazon and B&N -- are believed to be mainly profiting from content, and might even be losing money on hardware.

We don't know what's going to happen, but one scenario is that PC makers could fight each other for the in-between market, or the mid-range market -- $300 to $400 -- instead of ducking out or trying to compete with territories now occupied by the big three.