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Did Steve Jobs Pick the Wrong Tablet Size?
An anonymous reader writes "During the 2010 Christmas shopping season, Steve Jobs famously dissed the 7-inch tablets being rolled out by competitors, including Samsung's Galaxy, as being 'tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the [9.7-inch diagonal] iPad,' adding that 'the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.' A year later Jobs was dead, and the iPad Mini, with a 7.9-inch diagonal screen, was rolled out under his successor Tim Cook in October, 2012. Looking at industry-wide tablet sales numbers for January 2013, which show that the iPad Mini surprisingly outsold its larger sibling by a substantial margin (as did 7-inch Android tablets from competitors), Motley Fool's Evan Niu thinks that the 7.9-inch form factor was the correct size all along, contrary to Jobs' pronouncements (which, of course, was partly marketing bluster — but he chose the larger size in the first place). Of course the Mini is cheaper, but not by much — $329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16GB storage. Had Apple introduced the iPad with the smaller size to begin with, Niu argues, competitors would have faced a much more difficult task grabbing market share. While the Mini is currently available only with 'Super VGA' resolution (1024x768), rumors are afloat that Minis with the Retina display (2048x1536) are close to production."
Right, the Apple product is perfect in every way and everything else is either just a copy or shite. Nice try.
Thats's not what he said. If you're having trouble understanding, read my response to him.
the screen resolution was both low and an odd multiple of what came before so that it took a while for apps to be ported to it (since Apple encouraged everyone to code for fixed resolutions).
Again, read my post. Apple didn't want simple ports of what was already available on phones. They wanted new categories of apps with longer engagement times. Porting by changing resolutions is easy, especially when it's to a bigger device, and that wouldn't hold apps up for a while. Changing to a different style of UI was required and that took longer. But more importantly bringing out completely new apps that wouldn't make sense on a phone - that's what takes time.
Android largely missed this subtlety. Because they don't do anything to encourage anything other than stretching out the same old phone apps.
People said that the Galaxy Note would never sell. An oversized phone with an old fashioned stylus.
Imagine how much stronger the resistance would be had the iPad not already set up the paradigm of a tablet. His argument is exactly WHY "an oversized phone" could sell.