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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."
16KB storage: Apple is really screwing with the customer now.
Now there's two iPad sizes. And lots of sizes for Android tablets. A fair amount of choice for Win 8 too. Everyone's happy!
The mini is still inside what people perceive a "lower" budget. Price both the same and came back with this "study"....
Glossy fine print magazines are horrible on anything less than a 9.7" retina display. The 10" is for the sofa. The smaller tablets are for everywhere else, so they have more usage scenarios. But I wouldn't give up the 10" form, as it is well suited to the sofa.
Perhaps it was also a better size to kickstart the market. Obviously not a phone, nor a netbook, nor a laptop.
$25 per kilobyte.. bargain
Take that Apple!
Naturally most of Jobs' public comments were marketing hyperbole. His job and his passion were designing and promoting Apple products. Only a fool would expect him to endorse something he didn't believe was right. This story, though, is a classic what-if. Before the iPad, the current tablet market did not exist. There is no way to know if the current market would exist if the first iPad screen was smaller than 9.7" diagonal. Thus, it is impossible to answer the question posed. We cannot know if Jobs was wrong.
The majority of people who have bought Android tablets did so because they do not like Apple rather than because they wanted something with a smaller screen. Additionally, it is easy to forget now, but when the iPad first came out it was widely criticized as being too similar to an iPod Touch. It was only after quite a bit of time that it seemed to start to be taken more seriously despite having a screen with less than half the area of a "real computer".
It strikes me as odd that "only" a year after Jobs' death, the smaller tablet was released. It seems to me that it would take significantly more time for an executive board to come to an agreement on a new product, then design it, build it, put it through testing, establish a supply chain, etc etc. Jobs knew it was on the design table well in advance of his demise. What the public sees is far different from what takes place inside a company like Apple.
Narrowly looking at sales figures just after the mini was available & attempting to draw long term conclusions is extremely premature. The 7 inch iPad is selling better at present because of the people who wanted a smaller iPad but couldn't buy one.
Some people who had a 10 in iPad are now migrating to the 7s but the great majority are happier with the larger screen. Once the pent up demand is satisfied I expect the larger iPads will again be the better sellers.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
What he did wrong is: pick one size and anoint it The One True Size. Different people want different sizes for different uses. (Right now, I hear a lot of requests for larger tablets).
Jobs' ability to choose and decide was a blessing and a curse: it keeps the company hacks in line and Jobs was usually right... but he was also sometimes wrong, and, above all, sometimes "picked a winner" when there was room for more than 1 device.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I don't own any iPad - I'd probably buy an iPad4, rather than an iPad Mini because I currently don't want to carry anything bigger than an iPhone 4S in my pocket - and I see more usage-scenarios for me with the iPad4.
I hope there's still an iPhone 4S-formfactor phone from Apple in two years....
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I answered all the Genius Questions Correctly and never got a call back
Gosh, that's surprising given your obviously masterful social skills.
You really can't read the license agreement on anything less than 10".
> 9.7" should be enough for everybody.
That's what she said!
He was right - emphasis on "current crop". Despite announcing that they had shipped 2M Galaxy Tabs to stores in Jan 2011, they only managed to sell 1.4M by Q2 2012.
It was easier to make a decent small tablet later than it was earlier due to technology improvements. If the first iPad was 7.9" but otherwise used the same battery technology, you'd have seen a lot of people complaining about the battery life - the third generation iPad had a 70% greater capacity than its predecessor, and those improvements to the technology will have made a significant different to the utility of a smaller iPad.
That's 16GB storage, not 16KB.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Brand new $329 product sells faster than $499 product with minor spec bump! Film at 11! (Comparison with iPad 2 is silly - it is an old product which, has lower specs than the Mini, has the same number of pixels as the Mini, still costs $70 more and will probably be discontinued soon).
Meanwhile, the first generation of 7", 16:9 tablets of which his Steveness was speaking didn't exactly sell like hotcakes. The format has since been popularised by Amazon and Google offering extra cheap 7" tablets firmly aimed at media consumption (which they may be treating as loss-leaders).
Its also worth bearing in mind that the Mini isn't a 7" 16:9 tablet, its a 7.9" 4:3 tablet with the same number of pixels as the original iPad. That's a non-trivial difference especially when (e.g.) you want to type in landscape format.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
re:$329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16KB storage
.
Hey, "editors" of slashdot, you might want to edit the reference to "16 KB of storage" to the correct value. You know that 640K ought to be enough for anybody, but 16KB, well that just seems wrong! C'mon, people and so-called "editors", get to actually reading the blurb before posting it to the front page. And what's with all the idio-advertising-spam shit on the firehose. I stopped going in the last three weeks because 90-98% of the firehose entries are "come visit kerala india" (I even had a tourism-bot spam one of my posts with a spam reply, yikes) or "come buy clothes from this tailor" or other spam.
I agree that he may have been incorrect. The iPad (version 1, 3G, 32gb) is the only (and will be the only, judging by the current lot) Apple product I own. I bought it because I was taken by the idea, and I have enjoyed it. However, having seen a lot of my colleagues reading their Kindle's on Fire's and Google Nexuses' I admit to being somewhat taken by the smaller form factor (7 or 7.9). However since if I wish to carry a tablet out and about I will still require a rucksack of some kind, so 7.9 or 9.7 or 10.1 or whatever, I can carry either. However I am fairly old fashioned in my media consumption habits when mobile; websites and books, maybe the odd show I have transferred a across. In the UK, hilarious "fair usage" (whereby it's apparently unfair to stream a single episode of House of Cards et cetera on Netflix as this depletes your allowance entirely, good job building that 4G superhighway and then only letting mopeds use it!) prevents me from doing "heavy media" whilst out and about, so I stick to reading. For me, I believe the smaller 7" tablets are better for this activity; they are lighter, cause less stress on the wrist and are consequently more comfortable to use for extended periods. When the iPad eventually dies, I will replace, most likely, with a Google Nexus (depending on the iteration they are on at that stage). I am a great fan of coffee table books - the big, well produced ones (I especially enjoy my one's about Transatlantic Liners and Concorde, as well as my classical music encyclopaedia) still haven't been threatened (I saw that 20" thing, but the price is absurd); larger screens are naturally more conducive to a more pleasurable experience with this type of material. I think my point here is that it's entirely subjective, but what is clear is this: iPad is the most successful tablet by a long way, the centre of gravity revolves around 9.7", and will do so for the next few years. I will probably go smaller on account of my usage, but as 4G gets opened up with meaningful usage caps (ideally from moped to articulated lorry, but I'd be happy with a small van) the larger tablets. For the record: in suburban/rural England, we don't have a perpetual bubble of wifi in an urbanised area; cellular networks are all we have outside the home. I'd like rural England to remain just that too; thank you very much!
*Insert ridiculous, apparently intelligent but ultimately meaningless phrase here*
And that's why a lot of people choose to go straight to palliative care. They might extend their life by 6 months to a year, but the side affects of the treatments are so horrible and you're going to die anyway they'd rather choose the easy path.
You are all getting ripped off in the size department, the only fondle slab you need today is a Sony Tap20
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...but what you want to do with it does.
I'm not normally one to leap to Jobs' defence, but IMO he was right about the preferable size. However, I'm prepared to accept that since my acuity of vision is quite a lot less than 20/20 (I hope this is the only characteristic I share with that man - though I wouldn't object to having as much money), this might affect my perception. My Android phone is adequate for its purposes (actually, I'm very happy with it), but I struggle to use it if I don't have my glasses handy. But if I want a device that's small enough to carry in my pocket, I want it to be small enough to carry in my pocket *comfortably*, and a 7"-plus device doesn't qualify.
You're absolutely right. There's no way his cancers would have progressed if he had stood right next to a nuclear bomb test.
Horses for courses. I prefer my Nexus 7 to my iPad for reading. It's the perfect size to take to bed to read ebooks and articles I've saved to Pocket before going to sleep. I find my iPad a little too unwieldy for some reason. It's not even like I have small hands or anything either.
Who the f*ck is criticizing the Steve Jobs after he's dead???
Well, there was no shortage of good reasons not to like him. If I were Chris-Ann Brennan, for instance, I would probably have considered his behaviour to be unforgivable.
Developing the original larger iPad was probably an order of magnitude easier to design and produce than the smaller iPad...the screen resolution is the same (original non-retina). It was also probably easier to develop the larger Retina iPad than it was to develop the smaller Retina iPad (should be out soon enough). By releasing the iPad's in this order, it allows people to buy multiple iPad's, resulting in more revenue, which allows them to use that revenue to develop the next version, etc. It was all part of the plan. It's just like how they would release the iPod in white and black, then colors.
When the 9.7" came out, people were mocking it as simply a "bigger iPod touch" with no market. This problem would only be amplified with a smaller, 7" form factor.
The 9.7" made it clear that it was in a market of it's own - it's not simply a slightly bigger phone, nor a netbook without the keyboard.
Considering the iPad's success, I think that it's pretty clear they got it right (with profits) either way.
Now, with Steve bashing the 7" screen factor - but OF COURSE! He's a salesman - naturally he'll work hard to tell you why his product is better, and why you shouldn't buy other alternatives.
Then again, there's some truth to his opinion: having had an iPad for 3 years and moving on to a 7", I felt like the tablet wasn't offering me enough screen estate to justify bringing it out all the time - my 5" smartphone could do everything just as well. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that for some people, a 7" tablet is sufficient for their purposes.
With the rise of 5.5" and larger smartphones though, I personally think 7" tablets are becoming a smaller market. If I want something bigger than my smartphone, I'd be looking for a 9" and bigger device, not a 7" one. The only thing 7" has going for me is the price.
Jobs, probably picked the size because he liked it the most, but from a marketing point of view it was a also good idea. There were already smaller (unsuccessful) tables on the market, and Jobs obviously did want the iPad to be mistaken for those.
By picking a larger model, they could also increase battery size, screen resolution, CPU power. So it really was a good decision from a tech-point of view too.
The 8" might have been more difficult to compete with if they had started there... certainly they couldn't have started at the current price point.
So: No. He made the right choice. Tim Cook also made the right choice not to start with retina -- Because it would have required more power and more difficult production processes.
Finally, Apple often starts with one size/model and the expand from there. It enables them to continuously release new models with new features. E.g. everyone expects a retina iPad mini now. By that strategy it was better to leave a hole in the market between the iPod touch/iPhone and 10" iPad, and then fill it out later.
I think they have picked the wrong size again. The 7.9 inch does not fit in a jacket pocket, but the Nexus 7 does - the extra 1.3cm width stops it fitting. I also think that the ideal sizes are 7 inch for portability, and maybe as big as 12 inch for home or business - I would love to read an A4 (US letter roughly) document pretty much full size (trimming the margins). The 10 inch screen does shrink it a little too much. The 10 inch is too large to be portable, too small to represent documents full size.
Apple offered a compelling product that was different from everything else - and used it's app store to build a strong supporting infrastructure to create a market. At some point, that market starts to slow as demand is satisfied; even if you still own the largest market share it's not going to grow like you want it. At that point, you decide where to play next - the smaller tablet was a natural move since it builds on Apple's strengths and meets a different need. Sure, you'll cannabalize some sales of the other products but you've grown the overall market for your products and continue to grow revenues and profits. It's the same as P&G introducing a new variant of a laundry detergent - meet another consumer need and drag in new customers as well as some switchers - and make more money in the end. Had apple introduced the smaller iPad first and then the larger you'd be seeing analyst headlines saying they made a mistake and should have introduced the larger one first.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I think the 10" form factor is better - the keyboard is SO much easier to use. But it is just too heavy. If they can get the weight of the 10" model down a bit to something like 3/4 of what it currently is, I think they're on a winner.
I currently have both an iPad 4 and iPad mini for evaluation purposes and the mini is just so much lighter. But the form factor on the 4 is better for trying to actually do anything other than browse (typing anything, etc).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Owning both a 4 and a mini - i'd suggest that yes, the touchscreen experience is compromised on the mini. However - the weight is just so much less, i find myself using it more often. But if i need to do any sort of extensive touchscreen or keyboard input, the 4 is far preferable. Its just so heavy...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The right size is 7.8", and Tim Cook ought to have known that.
Who the f*ck is criticizing the Steve Jobs after he's dead???
"wrong" tablet size??
WTF?
Oh enough already with the iMessiah. He was a human, not a god. Not only can humans be wrong from time to time, but they can be fucking wrong, as evidenced by iPad mini sales, which was the entire point of the article. The fact that he's dead is almost irrelevant. The fact that the mini rolled out fairly quickly after his death makes me wonder if he finally realized he was wrong.
And remember he clearly had no qualms about telling others they were wrong. If anything, we're paying homage to the great asshole and marketeer he was. If he was alive today and someone had the gall to tell this to his face, he's probably hire them.
I have used both the 10 inch iPad and the 7 inch Nexus and the Nexus is the one that gets used all the time, it fits in my back pocket and it's big enough to actually watch something or write an email.
I prefer the 7 inch form factor which fits nicely on my trucks dash and doesn't block the view, it's my music/navigation center.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
People like to brag they have no TV, but the reality is that the keyboard-less tablets are just the latest incarnation of consume-only-produce-nothing started by TV.
Having been an early adopter of smartphones, getting an Audiovox 6700 Spring PocketPC in 2004 with slide-out tactile QWERTY keyboard, I avoided the current crop (everything post-iPhone) for as long as I could, even after my beloved PocketPC gave out in 2009. I recently got a Galaxy S3, and while it looks nice, I'm continually frustrated at the short messages it effectively limits me to tapping out.
I realize I'm in the minority, and, sorry, don't know any other way to say this, but that's what scares me. No one has given up TV -- they've just moved on to the next TV.
Now, tablets do have their use-case, and that is as clipboard substitute in business environments where the only input on those clipboards needed is checkboxes and signatures. The advantage of a tablet over a clipboard, of course, is instant and total recording of data into a central database.
And BTW, 1024x768 is XGA, not SVGA, which is 800x600.
Steve Jobs is FAMOUS for deriding products/features not currently delivered by his company, followed by releasing exactly those features some time later when the market is ready for HIM. (iPod with video, for example.) His strength of personality (and strong products) let him get away with it repeatedly, and few observers ever held him to task for it. The problem with the iPad Mini is that he wasn't around to push it through with his charisma. Clearly it was in the works before he died, and I doubt anything "in the works" would not be known to Jobs.
16KB - seriously? It's not like anything today is still measured in KB
The bandwidth of my effing Time Warner Cable "broadband Internet" connection ... When my neighbors are home, KB is the only way to effectively measure it without using negative exponents.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
People give Steve Jobs way too much credit. He was good at packaging technology for the masses and charging 200% markup, but that's about it.
You must be new here.
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People forget that when the 10" iPad came out, the main competition was from the 10" netbook. How would a 7" iPad had faired against that? There were tablets of various sizes prior to the iPad, but they weren't as popular as the netbooks were. People were already using the 10" form factor in their netbooks. Apple improved upon it by going beyond 1024x600 and ditching the keyboard. At the time a 7" iPad would probably had been viewed as an oversized iPod Touch.
It may turn out that the 7" form factor is what the market settles on, but the question is whether or not there would have been a market to settle on if there wasn't the 10" iPad, first?
ps. I am no Apple fanboy, just a realist.
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)
[citation needed].
After owning an iPad since release in 2010, and now switching to a Mini, I've come to the realization that the full size iPad is much more useful. You trade portability for overall comfort too.
I thought the mini would be just as good as the full size iPad, but it's not. If you had given me the two choices in 2010, I'd have chosen the Mini, so Steve Jobs did it right : )
Actually, it is pretty well documented that Jobs would almost-certainly have lived a much longer life if he'd followed his doctors' advice in the first place and gotten standard cancer treatment right when advised (which, if memory serves, was surgery to remove the relatively-slow-growing tumour), rather than doing new-age-y bullshit. The particular cancer he had wasn't very malignant, and could almost certainly have been dealt with almost exclusively through just, well, removing it. Instead, it metastasized because he thought he knew better than everyone else (for better and worse) -- which, in this case, included the highly-trained professionals whose advice he ignored.
They sold billions worth of 9.7" tablets. Now they're selling billions worth of the 7.9" tablets, many times to owners of their 9.7" tablets. Getting people to double-dip into their wallets for what is essentially the same product looks more like genius to me than a mistake.
Look at all the people trying to rationalize this as Jobs lying rather than admit he was wrong.
I think bigger would be even better. Maybe no more portable than a laptop that point, but around the house it would be far more visually immersive.
I don't think I would have purchased an iPad Mini if it had been first—and I certainly wouldn't have discovered it as a work machine (contrary to popular opinion).
Now I have both a smaller tablet-like device (Galaxy Note phablet) and an iPad 2. The smaller one is my content consumption and carry-around device, for the most part, but I use the iPad 2 for a lot of my work, over and above my Macbook Pro, and wouldn't want to try to do it on the smaller screen or on the larger one.
In order to build the new set of use cases, rather than simply place devices into existing categories, Apple had to hit just the right spot. The 10" device that was too big to be a phone or PDA but had an operating system that made it clearly not a desktop or like previous Windows tablets was exactly that spot.
Everybody took this as a weakness ("WTF is this supposed to be? What is it for?") but that is precisely evidence that you're opening up a new market that people haven't yet imagined. If people had immediately known what it was for, that would have been a sign that it had fallen into a previous category, and sales would have been limited to those already buying or looking in that category, excluding anyone that had already decided that they didn't need (for example) an iPhone or PDA on the one end, or a "tablet computer" on the other end.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If the format is 4:3. Apple screwed up by rejecting a widescreen format. Watching video on an IPad stinks because all you see is the screen you paid dearly for that is filled with black pixels.
the 9.7 inch diagonal of iPad, regardless resolution (i.e. iPad / iPad 2 against iPad 3 / 4 Retina), is just perfect...!!! Jobs got it on the spot... unique, top quality web exeperience, nothing else is on the market today. Safari is unique on iOS. For everything else on the fly, the smarthphone or iPod touch will do. cheers womby
Just combine them all.
640K Natalie Portman Goatse's when the walls fell on the first post by a naked, petrified gay jew eating hot grits while finding your ideas intriguing and wanting to subscribe to your newsletter in space should be enough for anyone.
Although there are probably a lot of slashdotters who would enjoy seeing Natalie Portman do a goatse, so that might actually make things worse.
It's the same size as seen on Star Trek, and we all know that's in the future.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Natalie Portman was my mother, you insensitive clod!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Seems like all of that is because of cutting the blood supply to other organs.
I have to ask - can we not replace that segment of the artery with something, so we don't have to rip out half your guts in order to remove a tiny piece? I'd like to think we had the ability to do that these days.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Tablets are big phones, not small computers. Cramming consumer applications onto tiny phone screens was more successful than expected, but 3 to 4 inch screens were too limiting. Having about twice phone screen area made phone apps look very nice. 4x as much area as a phone screen wasn't all that much better, given that the same thing has to be usable on a phone screen.
Computer screens are too big for consumers, or at least those who market to them. Thus, the typical web page layout has ads at the top, left, bottom, and right, plus some menu bars. There are about 50 to 100 clickable items on most desktop/laptop screens showing a full screen web page, including all the browser and system menus. The useful content would usually fit on a 7 inch tablet screen, and that's what we're seeing.
Bigger screens are for applications that need more input. Most people have nothing useful to say to their computers, so they don't need that.
I disagree... It's pretty clear why there's still fascination with Steve Jobs after his death. Among other things, it's significant that he supposedly left several years worth of new product ideas in the pipeline at Apple before he died. The new releases coming out of Apple today and in the near future are all likely part of a "roadmap" he handed them.
It's also pretty clear that Apple tries to stay true to the formula Steve had for them, vs. changing things too drastically and getting an unknown result.
I think on the "optimal size" of the iPad, Jobs probably did what he so often did; made his decision based on his personal preference. Don't forget, this product came about when he was spending a lot of time in a hospital bed, where he was lying down. That's a perfect use-case for a tablet, and NOT for any of the traditional portable computing devices that were widely available on the market. On the first generation of the product, I'm sure things like battery life would have been compromised with a smaller device too. So all of that played a role in picking the larger size as the best.
We watched the iPads evolve through 4 generations after that before Apple decided to offer the 7.9" version.
10 inches in A4 portrait format is fabulous for viewing music sheets in sheet or chord lay out... music sheets are the killer for tablets... iPad in portrait are the killer format... all those Android tablets in wide screen format are missing the entire reason for having a large screen..
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.' A year later Jobs was dead,
The Jobs was dead thing is not cool. It shouldn't be in the summary.
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Hoax. There's nothing on netcraft.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As much as it pains to me agree with a narcissistic jackass like Steve Jobs, I've recently found that my 7-inch Nexus is just too annoying to read science/technical papers on and I am considering a 10-inch pad. For pleasure reading and for videos 7 inches is fine, though.
Depends on so many things it's pretty much pointless to discuss in general terms.
Some sorts of cancer, detected at some stages, palliative care is exactly the way to go for the reasons you describe. (As a rule of thumb, the worst cancers tend to be those that develop deep within the body. As often as not, by the time you get diagnosed you're already long past the point of no useful treatment).
Jobs' case was a little different for two reasons:
1. He was "lucky" (if luck is the word) to have a variant of pancreatic cancer that is relatively treatable.
2. He was being regularly scanned for other reasons, and hence was caught at an early stage.
The GP - while s/he could have worded it rather more tactfully - is actually pretty well correct. Had Jobs chosen more orthodox treatment on the day he was diagnosed, there's a very good chance he'd still be with us - and in reasonably good health - today.
So you're aware, Betamax was Sony's product. Regarding that format war, you may also be interested in this article. I see predictions related to porn and Blu-ray, but I don't think it'll matter as everyone I know who has a collection of porn (myself included) keeps it on a hard drive these days.
It took Android a while to start grabbing tablet market share, 10" tablet's weren't particularly successful either. Android didn't start with 7" exclusively. There was 10" Galaxy tab from Samsung, there were Motorola Xoom, Acer A500 and probably many others which I've have never heard of. None of them were particularly successfull in 2011, regardless of size.
In 200x when the iPad was being developed for the 2010 release one could not put enough batteries in a 7" form factor to power the device for the strict time requirements Apple put on the device and also to meet the thickness requirements. So, AT THE TIME, a 9.7" screen made sense....
However, in 2012, lower power everything has come out, and better batteries have been created, now a manufacturer can successfully run the device for an acceptable amount of time with smaller batteries. So a smaller form factor is appropriate for 2012 for the majority of users.
As others have already mentioned, SJ, was just being his dismissive self when deriding the non 10" competitors in 2010, and backed himself into a corner...
True, but i really think the mini is at the "light enough" point for a tablet. If they COULD make it lighter, i'd rather they spend the weight to give it more battery, better screen, better processor, etc. The iPad 4 is just unwieldy by comparison. Yes, firstworldproblem, etc; but if you're an iPad X owner, seriously try spending some time with a mini. I was a skeptic and totally see the point.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Looking at my $80 7" tablet I would have to say "yes". Not that this need involve Apple at all - PDAs like these have been around for over a decade. It's just nice to have them now with more memory and I do like having the screen a bit bigger than my last PDA, a Sharp Zaurus which was perhaps 4 inches.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Mini tablets with 2048x1536? Some people must really hate battery life I guess...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Don't be foolish. Of course Steve Jobs didn't pick the wrong tablet size. If Jobs and reality are ever in conflict, reality is wrong.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
It's a marketing trick. You don't have that product out but the competitor does? Make fun of the product. Deride it. Make it seem useless. Then when your version is ready, make it appear like it's a whole new generation.
This worked especially for Jobs, who could hold back any market demand for as long as he needed to.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Apple reportedly has two new iPad products in the works - a retina display mini (same form factor as existing mini, and currently rumored for the Fall), and the new "iPad5" (reportedly, the 9.7" retina display ipad with the new, thinner iPad mini's design and thinness).
What will be interesting is to see what the market will say about screen size preference once the design and thinness are again in line, giving an apples-to-apple comparison again.
I *almost* bought a mini, then almost bought a Surface RT, but decided to wait for the retina display iPad mini, since I'm now spoiled by the retina display of my 4s. Now that I hear of the new thin, full-size iPad, I may again look to opt for the full-size tablet instead. I suspect I'm not the only one that may flip my preference back to an improved 10"-ish iPad.
(FWIW, none of the Android tablets, and I've tried nearly all of them, are nearly responsive enough to touch to avoid irritating the crap out of me. The Kindle Fire HD comes the closest., but it's still not good enough to want to live with. Say what you want about Apple's numerous downsides, they *get* what it takes to make a responsive touch device, hardware, firmware, and software. Easy test: Load a large, complex web page on any tablet, then grab the scroll bar and drag up and down like mad. So far, Apple is the only one I've seen that can keep up.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Before you know it, Apple will have about 45654363456 tablet sizes anyways!
Instead of an Ark, maybe Noah should have just built a lot of rowboats.
Saint Jobs said. QED.
I like my Optimus G and my Nexus 7.
Time to start numbering each and every boring slashdot joke. Then we can save so much time by typing 6...18...42!1! And imagine how many jokes we can pack into our SIGs! Boy there are going to be some fun times ahead. We are all so smart. So very smart. So repetitively smart. Did I mention how smart we all are?
It's still in the delivery.
And goatse was my father, you insensitive clod!
One thing I think the naysayers have consistently (and stubbornly) misunderstood about Jobs is that his verbiage doesn't mean what they think it means.
You have a man who was uncomfortable promising things he couldn't deliver, and yet his defining characteristic was that constantly pushed his people to accomplish the improbable. Like a lot of other CEOs, he's going to tell the customer that an infeasible product idea is not going to work, or is impossible. The difference is that while other companies will take this as gospel and will give up on the idea, or at least defund or marginalize the team that was working on the idea, he kept them working on it.
If he tells you that a 7" tablet won't work, what he actually means is, "It's a shitty experience, and I don't peddle shitty experiences. Come back in a year and ask me again'". If the guy who introduced a tablet that was 1/3rd thinner AND faster than anything you'd ever seen before tells you it's a shitty experience, he's probably right. For now.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
The 7" tablet is about the size of what we currently know as a 'half sheet' of 8.5x11 sheet of paper. This is roughly the size of the journal that Ben Franklin carried around to write notes in. ... Franklin (now Franklin-Covey) has been selling 'Daytimers' of about that size for years. Why have they been such high sellers and adopted by millions? You guessed it, size. Big enough to read and write on, small enough to 'carry everywhere'. The day planners do you no good if you get an inspiration or need to schedule a meeting and it is 'on my desk'. It must be with you. ... The same goes for tablets.
... But even around here, I enjoy relatively good wireless internal to my home area that makes devices useful.
Is there a need for bigger and smaller displays? Yes. We do 2" screens to 60+ inch displays all in the home. To carry about, IMHO, there are a few 'critical sizes'. The 'shirt pocket', the 'hand carry', and the 'in the backpack' sizes. Shirt pocket can be small to an iPhone/Android screen phone size. Hand carry is the mini-tablet, 7" or so, I keep thinking that there was a reason why Amazon make the kindle that size and it became their most popular model. It is convenient, it fits in a large pocket or purse, and is a 'thin' novel size. The larger 'backpack' size can be from the large iPad to a 'Windows Surface' to to a full laptop. The 'netbook' fit into the same size as the mini-tablet, but unless you have one that can work with or without the keyboard, the tablets with 'optional' keyboards seem to be a good solution. Still even the netbook is a neat toy to have and covered that range for 'high function' before the full-function tablet technology caught hold in a big way for that form factor.
Many of us still find the keyboard easier to use when writing the great american novel or doing things like posting on slashdot, but the on-screen and blue-tooth addon keyboards for the tablets help a lot when not -on the move- when reading/content consumption rather than generating content is the primary task.
I would still like to try one of the laser projection keyboards, but my toy money only goes so far.
These kinds of technologies are not 'either-or' but both. I still like my desktop (big monitors, all my high power goodies at one spot) but it turns into my server more often anymore. A host for my 'local cloud'. ( My internet connection is slow and expensive for bandwidth, and cable/dsl/Wimax are not options here due to physical location, I may be going satellite soon unless something happens. )
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I've been doing that for ages.
Back when tablets weren't called "iPad" but "Palm IIIc" and color was the latest new rage.
And having a phone (Ericsson T39) which supports GRPS and has an infrared port (and bluetooth for that matter) was the latest gimmick, even if not everybody was finding a use for it (I mean, what's the point of having a (relatively high speed for back then) internet connection when you only have 3 lines of black-and white text on the phone screen).
Got even the foldable Stowaway keyboard (the old 4 parts one, which unfolds like laptop size full-rows keyboard).
Only swapped the PDA over time (Palm Tungsten T3, Tapware Zodiac 2). Added wireless handsfree in the mix (mostly from logitech because of extended battery life)
Has always been a great setup to take note at university and as way to check emails while on the go.
Best part for this setup?
Phone and screen are dissociated.
- Even if the PDA (or tablet) batteries are empty, you can still make emergency phone calls with the phone.
- When you're not surfing the web with the PDA/tablet (or using local wifi) you don't drain the phone's battery.
- When in a place with bad signal coverage, leave the phone near the window (and hooked to its charger) and sit comfortably where you want with your tablet.
- When receiving a call, just get the handsfree out of the pocked and push the button.
And from a paranoid-health-point-of-view:
due to their difference in range between cellular and bluetooth, there's a difference in power:
- The thing which emit lots of radiation goes next to the windows (see the coverage point above).
- The thing which only uses low power bluetooth goes into you pocket and your ear.
When I moved to smartphones it felt, well, smaller, worse battery life, worse coverage.
phablets solve some of this short commings (bigger size gives bigger screen, and more room for a bigger battery) but not all (the phone function doesn't rely on a separate battery and can't be left were signal is the best).
Going back to this combo might be a possibility, specially now that it is possible to sync the contacts between the dumbphone and the tablet.
Another possibility is to move to a wireless modem. If you think about it, in the tablet+dumbphone setup, you're using the phone as a glorified wireless modem.
As more people are using VoIP solutions (with skype the primary example) you don't need an actual phone anymore.
In the tablet+dumbphone setup, the dumbphone is simply replaced by on of these small phone-size device which receives 4G/3G signal and emits Wifi and Bluetooth.
Simply now you pair your handsfree with the tablet's skype or SIP client instead of the phone/modem.
Add a smart-watch (the kind which show caller ID, number of new messages, etc. Either the simpler models from SonyEricsson with only 1 line of text, or the more modern running android on a tiny screen) in the mix, so you rely less on the tablet's bigscreen.
You only lose the capability to make phone calls with the modem in case the battery of the tablet drains (though some of the modern android-powered whatch might fill this gap).
And in some country which doesn't have a way to send GPS position over VoIP you might have problems trying to call emergency service (EU's 112 or US's 911).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]