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Apple iPad Mini Could Complicate Things For Windows 8 Tablets
Nerval's Lobster writes "Current rumor suggests that Apple is gearing up to unveil its iPad Mini Oct. 17, with invitations to media arriving Oct. 10. That's according to Fortune, which obtained the information from an unnamed Apple investor who, in turn, heard those dates from other unnamed sources. While that attribution might prove a bit too vaporous for some people, it does align with earlier reports from AllThingsD that Apple is planning to reveal a smaller iPad sometime in October. If those rumors prove accurate, the unveiling of an iPad Mini in that timeframe could prove very bad news for the upcoming Windows 8 tablets. (Gizmodo offers a pretty complete rumor rundown on the iPad Mini's possible features here.) Unlike the traditional PC market, Microsoft doesn't dominate the market for mobile-device operating systems. Windows 7 tablets never gained much of a toehold among tablet users, who prefer iPads and Android-based devices by wide margins. When it comes to Windows 8 (and Windows RT, the version of next-generation Windows for ARM architecture), Microsoft is starting out as the underdog."
From what I've seen, Windows 8 tablets are focused on the 9-12 inch segment. I'd say the real threat posed by the iPad Mini is against the smaller stuff, like the small Kindle Fire (HD or not), Nexus 7 and similar hardware.
There is absolutely no story here. Nothing to even connect Microsoft and Apple.
"Competition from X could be bad for Y".
What a fucking wank fest this site is. Anyways, flame on, dopes.
Oh, wait...
I should be able to mod down the story so nobody has to read this garbage.
Would it be poor taste to sneak a large Steve Jobs poster onto the outside of Apple's release venue, with his quotes on 7 inch tablets?
"If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on the seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion.
Well, one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference. It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size. Apple's done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps."
Well I, for one, think it's a pretty big deal.
After all, it's not every day that Apple releases a new product, especially one with amazing, unheard-of new features like a smaller screen and more pocket-friendly dimensions.
Apple's best in class innovation wins the day yet again!
If the rumours are true and judging by the lack of innovation with the iPhone 5 it seems likely that the iPad Mini won't be anything special. Gizmodo seems to be expecting a sub-HD screen, the same as the iPhone, and fairly pedestrian hardware specs. iOS 6 is already out so we know what to expect from that.
Their competitors are doing things like split screen multitasking at a price point it seems unlikely Apple will be able to match (the iPod Touch is $300).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Where's my ~14" A4/Letter sized tablet? Give me a full sized page of text please.
The[sic] there's that name. Makes me think of urinate every time someone says it.
Probably best if I not tell you what I think when I hear the word 'pad'. -- Some woman
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I would argue that it does considerably more than simply complicate things. The iPad mini will show that Apple can create and expand upon a range of high quality devices on what is essentially a single platform. It's all about the ecosystem that you can buy today vs. Microsoft's ever persistent promises of a better tomorrow. While that may be an oversimplification, most end users just want something that works, looks great, and makes their lives easier. Currently, I don't see that with Windows outside of the traditional desktop experience.
Always nice to know that Apple plant's stories (or exposes the media bias). I love how everytime some big iPad killer is announced, *someone* posts a story about the iPad mini. Remember the Nexus 7 launch? One week later there was a iPad mini that proved to be vaporware. At least this time it's BEFORE the launch of Win 8, so we'll see it was just a plant story of vaporware.
... quietly, somewhere at the Apple offices all records of and references to the iPod Touch are being destroyed.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
But I don't want to W8. I want it NOW.
(I actually installed W8 on a Virtual Machine to try it out. Not too pleased with the Mobile interface on my big monitor.)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'm just waiting for Apple to claim that they invented the concept of a ~7" tablet and that all of the ones that have been on the market for years are actually copying their design...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Between us, I suspect that whatever Apple chooses to do will wipe the floor with whatever Windows 8 ends up being, but I have a hard time making myself care either way.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes enterprise users will switch in a heartbeat from 19in dual screen set ups to single 7" screen tablets *rolls eyes*
They won't, but they will have perfected it.
See tablets pre-iPad, and tablets post-iPad.
No, just the concept of 7.85" tablets. With a 2 minute-long movie in which Apple executives, on a white background, will describe the magic of those extra 0.85 inches.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
I'm inclined to agree. I can't tell what's less interesting (even to an Apple fanboy), an iPad Mini or a Windows 8 Tablet. I really truly thought the only reason Apple was going this way is so that it'd be a remote for the rumored Apple branded TV.
I get that, but I don't get a 7inch tablet, especially when most of the iPad owners I know are also smartphone owners.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
the magic of those extra 0.85 inches.
That's what she said!
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Win 8 tablet: apps to use, plus a *real* OS when I need it. Tired of using bullshit dataviz office on the go? Fire up MS Office 2010. Don't want to play bullshit touch games? Fire up Dead Space, Mass Effect, etc.
Please explain why that approach will suddenly work now when it failed for about a decade straight before Apple introduced the iPad.
iPad: iOS apps. Limited feature
It's called "focused" and is why Apple has sold tens of millions to date. Odd how people appreciate well written software that tries to solve a specific problem.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
FTA: ...Microsoft is starting out as the underdog."
That's a strange way to put it.
More accurate would be "...Microsoft has been unsuccessful in its more than 15 years of attempts at the mobile platform, despite its dominance in other sectors during that time."
The point is that whether the iPad is any good or not, there was no market before the iPad. List all the Android tablets on the market prior to Spring of 2010.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Every time there is a launch event, the share price jumps in the days between the announcement of the event and the event itself as rumors run rampant, and then the price tanks after the event when the newly announced product doesn't have all of the unrealistic features that the analysts and fanboys predicted. The price then goes up slowly but steadily afterwards when the average consumer realizes that it is a pretty good product despite not having all those impossible features and the product sells like hotcakes.
The last time Apple was without Steve, the board forced Apple out, and instituted policies that were the opposite of what Steve would have done. It was these policies that made Apple nearly go bankrupt. This time, the CEO and top executives were all hand picked by Steve for their ability and willingness to continue his policies in his absence. Remember, Tim Cook was effectively acting-CEO for the last year or so that Steve officially held that post due to Steve's health issues. Apple did perfectly fine during that period, if I recall.
"Microsoft and Android will have to fight a serious uphill battle against iPad. I have an iPad and love it to read material but as content creator (Even simple emails), it sucks. The market is wide open to fill the content creation gap."
I think it's the other way around. Unless it gets the patent courts on its side, Apple will have a serious battle maintaining its marketshare against the CheapPad or CheapTab makers. It might not seem obvious in the upmarket that's the US of A, but in other parts of the world, a person's second computing experience, after his soon-to-be-smartphone, will be on a non-Apple book-sized device.
Barring some price-PADding because of some adverse IP ruling, the price on tablets will go down to the cost of its parts. Moreover, tablets will be or are already being subsidized by large content or access companies eager to give away the keys to their walled garden: the better to lock up their costumers. At the moment, the darling of these companies is Android OS because it's as "free" as secondhand smoke in a bar. But if Microsoft decides to bite the bullet and "give away" Win 8, they can take a serious bite on the tablet market.
Unless it becomes too greedy for its onw good, Microsoft has a better chance of succeeding in the tablet and smartphone market than Apple has of maintaining its market share. A few years from now, Apple will be back to its status as the preferred gadget of the fashionable girls and boys.
Parent has it right, but there's even more to it than that. For one thing, it's bloody obvious that WOA / Windows RT has a full Win32 API; what the hell do you (the GP) think that Explorer and IE10 and cmd.exe and Task Manager and Office RT (or whatever it's called) and all those other hundreds of Win32 binary programs that ship on it are running against? In fact, I'm quite sure there's nothing that actually stops Windows Store apps from using it, except
A) they run with extremely restricted permissions, so many of the APIs won't do any good
B) much like the way that Apple rejects apps that call restricted APIs on iOS, the Windows Store app approval process will check the APIs that an app uses.
Also, aside from the UI, Office these days is pretty much identical between the Windows and OS X versions. That implies that not only is it free of "decades-old windows specific bloat" (as the GGGP claimed) but that much of it isn't even dependent on Win32 (the UI obviously is).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
But that brings up an interesting question...would ANY pad have sold if Apple didn't have their legion of fans hyping pads? I mean there were tablets before that but they were called what they were "large cell phones that can't make calls" yet when Apple puts out a large cell phone that can't make calls their fans go totally apeshit, I mean lines like its a fucking rock concert apeshit.
So the question becomes 'Would ANY tablet, no matter how well designed, have had a chance if it wasn't for the rabid Apple fan base hyping the form?" and I honestly don't think they would. Remember that this is a fanbase that refused to abandon Apple even when what they were putting out was SHHHHHIIITTTT, we are talking overpriced underpowered pizza boxes, yet they stayed. When the first Jobs blessed good products came out, like the candy colored iMacs they went completely apeshit and hyped the living hell out of them. I remember mac head reviewers talking about these things like they were the second coming! And then came the iPod, which I'll be the first to admit previous MP3 players were too damned menu happy but c'mon, the way the fans, especially the fanboys in the press wrote up the thing you'd think it was the greatest invention since the lightbulb!
And now all are gonna get to see this before their very eyes, as Apple puts out a form factor that Jobs himself said was stupid... I predict it will be a massive hit, because the fanbase will tirelessly blog and review and post and blather on TV about how wonderful a form factor that even Jobs thought was stupid so it'll sell. I mean you had Stewart and Colbert practically dancing with their new iPads, that kind of fanboy loving you just can't buy. While many of the rest of us will still think the same thing when we first saw the tablets...an oversized cell phone that doesn't make phone calls...okay.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What a lot of crap, you really have a bee in your bonnet about fanboys. You know what made them fanboys? Good products. People weren't gagging to buy the Newton. If Microsoft had released a device as well made a the ipod or the iphone or the ipad it still would have sold millions, because they all redefined usability. No, I'm not a fan boy, I use Linux exclusively at home, I have an iPod someone gave me for free and an Android phone, just to pre-empt another fanboy diatribe...
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.