Some Match

Brooke Crothers, in a piece headlined “iPad Met Its Match in the TouchPad”:

On Friday, August 19, Apple’s iPad finally met its marketing match. That’s when Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad went on sale for as little as $99 and triggered the kind of buying frenzy that had been reserved exclusively for products from Apple.

Over the last year and a half, no other tablet had been able to come as close as the TouchPad to eclipsing the fixation that consumers have had on the iPad.

Let me get this clear. The iPad “met its match” in a device that sold so poorly that after just 49 days on the market, HP decided to discontinue the product, abandon the WebOS hardware business entirely, and dump the existing stock at a significant loss. OK.

★ Sunday, 28 August 2011