Apple’s view of the tablet is now the accepted model, but one that most commodity competitors still haven’t figured out

A commodity play struggles in an unformed market
Ironically, the fact that tablets are new should have given Samung, HP, RIM, Acer, Dell, and everyone else a shot at standing out in a meaningful way, by taking advantage of the creative crucible that’s forming the mobile market. Yet they didn’t. I believe it’s because these companies have largely lost their innovation and creative juices, and view the world as a sea of me-too products differentiated only by superficial attributes like color and the “message” of their marketing campaign.

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It’s true that PCs and cellphones are generic devices, so there’s not much you can do to distinguish them other than quality and image. And even those aren’t surefire strategies in a commodity world.

For example, higher quality means higher price, but the PC and cellphone industries have long been in a race to the bottom, and users have become unwilling to spend more than $50 on a cellphone or $600 on a PC that will need to be replaced every year or so rather than paying 50 percent more for an item that will last several years. Equipment makers thus can sell you more goods, so they happily support that mentality, no matter that most of it is junk. That’s the mind-set that companies like HP, Samsung, and RIM are coming from, and yet they charge as much as Apple — and it’s one reason they’re falling flat (HP and the Android makers) and even failing (RIM).

Image is a harder sell and usually settles into two camps. One camp involves tech specs, and sites like Gizmodo and Engadget blather on and on about the latest smartphone from HTC or “Sammy” (Samsung) because its processor is 5MHz faster than last week’s model or its screen is 0.1 inch larger. These details don’t matter. The other camp concerns itself with superficial fashion, such as having an “exclusive” white model at Sprint or removable faceplates at Verizon Wireless.

In the young tablet market, a lot of this superificial-image strategy falls on deaf ears. The PC and cellphone makers have long struggled with the image issue. A decade ago, Acer had very nice laptops that felt better in use, thanks to real ergonomic design. More recently, HP upped the design quotient on its laptops, without crossing the line into fashion for its own sake. But most electronics makers either produce bland boxes (like the PlayBook, Xoom, and TouchPad) or tastelessly styled boxes meant to get your attention in a crowded store but nothing you’d want to show off at work (fortunately, unlike the cellphone market, there aren’t any of these yet in the tablet market).

The gold standard for industrial design of course is Apple, whose series of usually aluminum-skinned devices — iPhones, iPads, MacBook Airs, and iMacs — have become the icon that represents their entire class of product. It’s the whole package, of course, that attracts and delights customers: hardware, software, and app/entertainment ecosystem (that is, iTunes).

Apple is also skilled at the fashion game, but it relies on having very few variations, so the attention is on Apple, not the carrier or store in which you bought the product. By having a few models that stick around for a year or more, the image takes hold in people’s minds, unlike the flood of “designs” from everyone else.

That strategy puts competitors in a position of copying Apple’s iconic products (as Dell has tried to do with its various MacBook Air-inspired laptops and Samsung has with its iPad-inspired Galaxy Tab 10.1) or trying to stake out a new look. If you ape Apple’s designs, it begs the question for a buyer: Why not buy the real thing? Apple is the only PC maker whose sales are growing as a percentage of the market, despite its higher price — and in the tablet market, its price is no higher. Indeed, why not buy the real thing?

Of course, if you strike out in your own design direction, you need to have a long-term design philosophy that resonates with users and works across products over a sustained period of time — exactly the opposite mentality of “churn them out every few months” manufacturers. HP, HTC, Motorola Mobility, and Samsung seem to recognize the need but are stumbling with the execution.