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Amazon Fire

Amazon Fire

Why Amazon's New Tablet Is Great For Apple

From the “yeah, right” section of our news desk is Apple saying that the Amazon Fire tablet would be a benefit to the iPad because it would further fragment the Android platform. When the Fire was announced, everyone’s jaw dropped at the $200 price tag, and Amazon’s selling the thing at a $10 loss, hoping people will buy enough Kindle e-books to make its money back. The $500 iPad may have entrenchment on its side, but entrenchment doesn’t come with a $300 voucher for new buyers.

But Apple has a point. For non-techies, fragmentation is what you get when anyone can take the source code of an operating system and make their own version, and it’s one of the reasons that Linux has yet to really make a dent in the desktop. One Linux distribution comes without certain things that breaks compatibility with another one, so anyone looking to make an application can’t be sure it will run on all. It’s what’s known in tech circles as “baaaaad.”

Android has a similar problem, which is made worse by everyone making it tightly integrated with their device and its specific screen resolution. If Amazon’s Fire succeeds a little more than, say, the Samsung Galaxy Tab or Motorola Xoom, app makers will most likely shift focus to support that fork of Android. This tug of war has become a problem. The result is that the least open of the open-source platforms is going to get even more closed. 

Fragmentation or not, the success of Android phones has helped push Samsung to beat Apple in worldwide phone sales, and HTC isn’t far behind. Apple’s going to need more than “yo momma so fragmented, she left her ass in Jeff Bezos' car.”

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