DISASTER! SELL YOUR APPLE STOCK! Why? Because, according to Bloomberg and a billion other websites, Apple’s share of the tablet market has plummeted. During the three months to December 2010, Apple’s iPad grabbed ‘only’ 75 percent of shipments, down massively from the 95 percent it had in the previous quarter. Extrapolating wildly, analysts therefore predict Apple will within two years have a market share of minus 45 percent. ARGH!

Or, maybe—just maybe—what really happened is that Apple’s iPad had pretty much the entire market to itself at one point, and so got all the sales. And now there’s competition, Apple’s got less of the market. Of course, it’s a growing market, so Apple has a smaller slice of a much larger pie each quarter; also, it’s likely Apple’s profiting hand-over-fist and other companies aren’t, but SELL SELL SELL APPLE DOOMED OH MY GOD ANDROID FTW!

Oh, and  Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics:

Even at $500 retail, based on some of the research we’ve done, that’s probably two or three times more than what most mass market consumers are expecting to pay.

Really? Well, I hope “most mass market consumers” will be happy with their $170 tablets that, clearly, won’t be total heaps of shit. (I know technology tends to drop in price over time, but $170 for a tablet? Really?)