"they don't care about making profits on hardware, while everyone else, including Apple, does."
(1) Amazon has turned a profit on all of their hardware afaik. They may change their mind as they go for a landgrab but to say they don't care is not exactly true.
(2) You can make the same argument that Google and Microsoft don't care about making money on hardware. You can say "but Google and Microsoft rely on third parties" which is historically the case but less so today.
(3) Amazon cuts corners to get to a shock price. If the tablet is "not good enough" as they say then you can't commoditize it yet because the latest specs are worthy of chasing.
(3a) Amazon's high end machine in two and a half months has a SoC that's graphically comparable to what Apple started shipping in March 2011 [1].
(3b) The original Kindle Fire advertised 8 hours of btty life and delivered 6 hours [2]. KF HD doesn't even advertise one that I've seen. If it's 6 hours that's basically unusable for most people. The iPad doesn't last 10 hours because it's a convenient amount of batteries to put in a case of predetermined size. It lasts 10 hours because that's the minimum use case they determined for much of the market (students, professionals, readers, travelers) and things like the thickness of the ipad were driven by the amount of batteries you needed to get to 10 hours.
(1) Amazon has turned a profit on all of their hardware afaik. They may change their mind as they go for a landgrab but to say they don't care is not exactly true.
(2) You can make the same argument that Google and Microsoft don't care about making money on hardware. You can say "but Google and Microsoft rely on third parties" which is historically the case but less so today.
(3) Amazon cuts corners to get to a shock price. If the tablet is "not good enough" as they say then you can't commoditize it yet because the latest specs are worthy of chasing.
(3a) Amazon's high end machine in two and a half months has a SoC that's graphically comparable to what Apple started shipping in March 2011 [1].
(3b) The original Kindle Fire advertised 8 hours of btty life and delivered 6 hours [2]. KF HD doesn't even advertise one that I've seen. If it's 6 hours that's basically unusable for most people. The iPad doesn't last 10 hours because it's a convenient amount of batteries to put in a case of predetermined size. It lasts 10 hours because that's the minimum use case they determined for much of the market (students, professionals, readers, travelers) and things like the thickness of the ipad were driven by the amount of batteries you needed to get to 10 hours.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6158/the-archos-101-xs-review/...
[2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5128/amazon-kindle-fire-review...