Silly prattle
This article is full conjecture and speculation and zero basis in actual facts.
If you start flipping the subjects around, it makes much more sense, i.e. "Behind Samsung's/RIMs/WinMo's/HPalm's "success" are signs of desperation.
1. "For Apple, there has been disruption to its supply chain--no there hasn't, you apparently didn't read their quarterly report.
2. Apple itself is hovering precariously at the top of the curve--You're not hovering when you're the 2nd largest company in the world and your profit goes up 95% y/y for the quarter, you're blasting off, incinerating everything to dumb to stand close by. Again, did you actually read their report.
3. And as Google's own results indicated the company has only just begun in the mobile market,--Android's unit "activations" have soared--but Apple makes more money from mobile than all of Google put together.
4. Apple's quarter beat records as usual, but did not convince that the firm is more than a one-trick pony in mobile--Google is the one-trick pony here--selling your eyeballs to advertisers. Meanwhile Apple now has three distinct mobile product lines--iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad and the AppleTV is not far behind with 2 million sales since its introduction. GoogleTV and tablets are just a mess.
5. the iPad, though dominant in the nascent tablet category, is not yet proving that the category itself is a winner, or will be more than a niche form factor in the wave of new, cloud-focused products that will appear over the next few years--Except that it is beating the crap out everything and anything in its path and single-handidly made the category successful. iPad is selling now, everything else is completely missing an ecosystem, even the proposed "cloud' products.
6. The iPad sold 4.69m tablets, fewer than the 6.1m predicted by analysts or the 7.3m of the holiday quarter. It remains to be seen whether this is a short-term supply issue or an indicator of limited demand for the form factor.--so in other words, you don't know squat. You might have mentioned that the iPad 2 was introduced on March 2--freezing iPad 1 sales--and didn't go on sale till March 11 and the quarter ended March 26. Current quarter will show the strength of the iPad. Most analysts are predicting 40 to 50 million sales for 2011. It's everyone else that has nothing to show for the tablet initiatives. The mythical "cloud" solution won't fix that. The iPad can play in the clouds as well as any other tablet.
That's just the nonsense on the first half of the first page.