Wouldn't a "good enough" screen and multitouch sensor pretty much force the price above $99 (if the device is sold at a profit)? Or do you think that $99 is cheap enough that people won't mind resistive touch screens backed by TN panels?
Who knows? "Good enough" is a golden target that seems to be fantastically hard to nail.
I personally wouldn't think a resistive touch screen and a TN panel would be "good enough". But I also think that we'll see "close-to" iPad screen quality on an Android tablet in the $99 range within the next 2 years.
At least for future tablets, I suspect resistive + joypad would work well. Most of what you do on a tablet is passive browsing, and scrolling with a joypad is pretty easy.
The prototype for this is the Aldiko ebook reader. It gives me the choice of scrolling with the N1's touchscreen or with the volume control buttons - I always pick the physical buttons.
But a cheap + good enough + lots of vendors did take over the PC industry and the mobile phone market (the iPhone doesn't own it yet) and the car industry and the video game industry and <insert other industry>.
There are always exceptions to the rule. The success of the iPod in the face of fierce competition will be studied in depth in B-schools for the next 50 years. But in general, people are more willing to pay less for good enough features than to pay more for slightly better. That's why there are a bazillion Honda Accords and Toyota Camerys on the road, and far fewer cars that cost over $35k even if they are "better". Or why most homes have a GE sub-$400 Washing Machine instead of a $1200 LG. These things are "good enough" and cheaper.
But I'll freely admit that the iPad has taken off far more strongly than I think anybody would have expected. It may have hit that critical mass the way the iPod did as well and nothing will be able to break that.
I think the interesting part about the Accord and the Camery vs. the BMW is that by many objective standards (certainly by long-term reliability) the cheaper cars are actually /better/ than the more expensive cars.
would I rather drive a brand new BMW or a brand new toyota? while they are new, sure, I'll take the BMW. But speaking as someone who has owned an out of warranty BMW, well, after the warranty period is over, the Toyota is a better car.
the poor showing of apple and lenovo may be partly due to the higher retained value of their products. I expect IBM/lenovo or a apple macbook are probably the only laptops worth fixing once they are out of warranty. cheap laptops, once they are out of warranty, often have an ebay value less than what you'd pay to get it repaired.
From my reading of the article, it seems like they tracked the number of laptops which failed and needed repairs, not the number which failed and were repaired. So no, higher retained value doesn't explain it.
Even if they were looking at how many were repaired (where lower retained value could tilt repair percentage downward, by making people disinclined to repair them, as you suggest) this would merely make other brands of laptops less reliable (with lower numbers caused by fewer damaged laptops being repaired); correcting for it wouldn't improve Mac/IBM/Lenovo's numbers, though it could damage the others, making them seem better by comparison.
