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Did Steve Jobs Pick the Wrong Tablet Size?

Posted by Soulskill on from the nobody's-perfect dept.

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."

6 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. Does it matter? by deergomoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Does it matter? by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!

      I think it does matter. Jobs was even right about the big size being needed, though his explanation given was wrong (and who knows if he even told the full truth). If tablets had initially come at 7" then they would have been far too close to phones. There would have been almost no application that you could do on a tablet that couldn't be done reasonably on a phone just a bit worse. There wouldn't have been a reason to keep the two separate and development of tablet interface programs would be much slower. In the end people would have just called the iPad a "too big phone which you can't call from" and it would not have sold as it did. I think Android is only just managing to break through this barrier and Apple wouldn't have had nearly the success they have had first mover advantage.

      The iPad is its self almost exactly the maximum reasonable size for a tablet for most people. Even a tiny bit heavier than the heaviest iPad and many people can't hold it in one hand it for long. It's already big enough that it has to have a special split keyboard for some people to be able to type on comfortably. Also the iPad is close to the limit which fits comfortably into your personal space in economy class (no; a laptop is not "comfortable") and feels spacious elsewhere. On the other hand; the size is a limitation for some applications such as a full screen magazine spread. The battery is a limitation as a replacement for a book. For photo editing, a thing which a tablet could be good for the screen is still very much on the small side. You can see why really big people with big hands and their own private jets might like a bigger tablet and you can also see why Microsoft made the mistake of making the surface too big and heavy. If you were designing the iPad from scratch and you could make it fold and add anti-gravity and had no cost limts then you would probably end up with an even larger device with more inertia and much higher resolution (I wouldn't call it more "weight").

      An iPad mini makes sense now; however that's only because the iPad went before it and defined the category of a tablet. If that hadn't happened people would just be complaining that it's a too heavy phone. Me; I have multiple android devices and I find myself switching sizes; however I definitely prefer a tablet to a phone for plenty of stuff. I'm even wondering if it wouldn't be better to just have a dumbphone and a tablet instead.

      --
      =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
    2. Re:Does it matter? by BasilBrush · · Score: 5, Funny

      You sound just like my GF.

    3. Re:Does it matter? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple hit on a good combination while being noticed.

      What Apple did was make a device that worked (relatively) smoothly. While everyone else was dicking around with picking a particular feature set, Apple produced a music player, phone, and tablet that people wanted to use. Case closed. It's not because it did more, or because it was built better, it's because it was (relatively) nice to use. Someone else could have done this sooner, by picking goals which could reasonably be reached with the technology of the day. Instead they always had to push the technology and use every little bit of it from the beginning with the result that they often tried to do too much and wound up sucking.

      Today, practically any device is pleasant to use, because we have finally reached the point where you can throw more silicon at the problem in a portable device. People are all excited about how smooth their dual core phone is, well no shit, whole corporations ran on less processing power until not very long ago. But lots of us will annoyingly and repeatedly point out things like the speed of user experience on 8MHz 68k machines back in the day, including graphics and multitasking, scalable fonts, et cetera. This will not turn into a detailed rant about why programmers today need to man up and go back to assembly, it's just an observation. The point is that we all can have craploads of computing power in our pockets now if we choose to have it, so now the major differentiator is going to switch from whether they manage to make a working product at all from how pleasant it is to use and how pleasant they are to deal with. What Apple accomplished was bringing that sense of pleasantness to mobile devices. We had plenty of wow factor before, but very little polish.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Not just a giant iPhone by Bongo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:16KB storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    640K ought to be enough for everybody!

    Yes, I do agree...hearing this fucking joke 640,000 times ought to be enough for everybody...