[Closed] So the iPhone 5 has been launched - what about the iPad Mini....

The iPad mini was never going to be announced yesterday. There is a second conference in October (to coincide with the release of iTunes 11) that will unveil the new iMacs and the mini.

Oh and it will be £300ish according to my mate at Apple. (he confirmed the leaked iPhone 5 images were real as I stated on the other thread).

" I can't see it being a success when the competition is sub £200. "

no point competing on price if the product is crap.....

only thing that came close to the ipad 2 was the samsung galaxy - and i tested everything i could get my hands on in quite a few shops in the big smoke everything else was either laggy , slow or plasticy and cheap. and this was at a time when samsung were in a lawsuit for copying the ipad....

price difference was 30 quid at the time , and infact by shopping smart i actually paid less for the ipad2 than the galaxy was availible for online at the time.....

horses for courses

There was a interesting interview with Tim Cook (Apple CEO) a few weeks back at a conference where he claimed Apple don't pick a price point and make a product to fit it, they make the best product they can and then price it (and then add apple tax)

That can't possibly be true.

Seems plausible to me.

For all the criticisms you can level at Apple, you can't really accuse them of being cheap or compromising a product to come in at a lower price point.

£249 where does it leave the pricing of the new supposed upcoming iPad Mini?

it doesn't follow that the ipad would be more expensive than the touch just because its bigger.

From the horses mouth on mini tablets

Here’s the excerpt of Mr. Jobs’ speech from October 2010, followed by audio:

I’d like to comment on the avalanche of tablets poised to enter the market in the coming months.

First, it appears to be just a handful of credible entries. Not exactly an avalanche. Second, almost all of them use seven-inch screens, as compared to the iPad’s near 10-inch screen.

Let’s start there. One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately this is far from the truth. Screen measurements are diagonal. So that a seven-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.

If you take an iPad and hold it up in portrait view, and draw a horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn’t efficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion.

While one could increase the resolution to make up 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 their present size. Apple has done expensive user testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff.

There are clear limits of how close you can place physical 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.

Third, every tablet user is also a smartphone user. No tablet can compete with the mobility of a smartphone–its ease of fitting into a pocket or purse, its unobtusiveness when used in a crowd. Given that tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pockets, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in their pocket is clearly the wrong tradeoff.

The seven-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone; too small to compete with a iPad.

There's been plenty of tech articles I've read that have done a complete strip-down and analysis of everything that goes into an iPad, and the conclusion that they all came to was that there was no manufacturer that could even [i]make[/i] an iPad equivalent for the price Apple actually sell them for, and I believe it's much the same for the iPhone, largely because of materials used, engineered metals and glass against plastics.
Tim Cook is a master of the supply chain and component sourcing for maximum price advantage. I'm happy to pay a bit extra for quality build, in hifi, electronics...
It's why I used to buy Sony kit, beautifully designed, and really well made, but you paid more for it. No difference with Apple kit.

The profit margin apple has on its iphones is signicantly higher than other phones - the 4S is something like 70% (10% would normally be considered good). That will be repeated on their tablets.

Im typing this on my ipad so im not an apple hater but the idea that they cost more because of the materials or components used is wrong

I heard a sound bite the other day that said Apple are making more money from phone sales that Microsoft make company wide. Not sure how true that is, but it's startling if it is.

[url= http://www.****/sciencetech/article-2212664/iPad-mini-rumours-Apples-Asian-suppliers-begun-mass-production.html ]Mini ipad[/url] 🙂 was just about to buy a google nexus.

every tablet user is also a smartphone user

Er, no.

I kinda agree with Jobs statement. I don't really see the point of a mini-tablet (or a huge smartphone) - both seem like an odd compromise (to me).

For a tablet I want to be able to read a magazine comfortably on it so I want a high-res screen close to A4 size.

For a phone I want something fairly unobtrusive that fits in my pocket, that has a big enough screen to be usable, but small enough to use with one hand.

So for me the current form-factors make sense.

More importantly, can someone please recommend a good sleeping bag for when I'm queuing for days outside an Apple store to buy one of these mini ipad thingies?

Really, it's all just chopping up the spaces between niches and making more niches. [i]Someone[/i] will want one.

More importantly, can someone please recommend a good sleeping bag for when I'm queuing for days outside an Apple store to buy one of these mini ipad thingies?

You mean you don't already have the iBag 3?

The Kindle sized devices are light and a good size for reading text only books. I think it is a different market segment than the "full service" iPad and I can see a market for a cheaper/smaller device. I wouldn't buy one as I prefer the larger screen.

@joao - just order it on-line and wait for it to be delivered, no point queuing.

BlackBerry playbook is around £110 for the 64gb version and OS2.1 came out yesterday which seems to have fixed its flaws

Interesting post MrNutt as I have a blackberry phone so the playbook would make sense but the reviews absolutely pan it.

Waiting for the new iMac to come out. No point buying one yet. It'll be my first Mac!

As a niche for people who can't afford/don't want to pay out for a tablet and a kindle the 7" size tablet seems perfect. But if your decision is budget based why go apple.

For me the perfect combination is
Small smart phone - Its in my pocket all day every day so it needs to be small.
Kindle - For reading books (the new one with the light looks luurvely)
10" tablet - for consuming the world, reading magazines, sending emails, a bit of working.
A laptop - For work.

I wouldn't want to do with out the phone and the laptop. The kindle + 10" tablet are luxuries that I could do without or consolidate into 1 7" tablet (that is better for reading books than a 10" tablet and better a consuming the internet than an ereader) if I wanted to suffer the consequences of my tablet being too small and my ereader not being papery

What all the whaffle means is I can see a market for a 7" tablet but it aint me.

But then when the iPad came out I was adimant it was completely pointless if you had a laptop and a smart phone and now I can't put mine down!

You mean you don't already have the iBag 3?

Anytime now they will launch the DouchePad....oh wait they already did.

It'll be a 7.85" screen, which, while only a slight difference, makes it close to the size of a paperback book, and also makes it a very practical size for using OS maps on with something like Viewranger.
And also a useful size for a navigation device in a vehicle, as well, which a current iPad isn't.
That is, if the thing even exists. I know SJ dismissed it, on the grounds that the screen was too small, but he never said that about the even smaller iPhone and Touch screens; he was a master of mind-changing and obfuscation, and said there would never be a video iPod, for example.
We'll see when it gets announced.

Smaller iPad aimed at smaller people just in time for Christmas

I think it makes a lot of sense TBH
I have an iPhone that gets used solely for voice calls and occasionally as an mp3 player on flights etc.

It's too small for me to comfortably use for much else, I can't be bothered to get out my reading specs every time I want to use it and the buttons are way too small and cause constant errors.
There's lots of other people like me that can't be bothered with the size of full tablet or the frustrations of a smart phone so I reckon there's the market for it, not sure I'd be a buyer though , who knows?

Doesn't really matter what jobs thought. He's dead.

They are responding to a commercial threat. Simple really.

Theres an Elephant in the room; Google Nexus 7

The playbook used to suck but with 2.1 its got a lot better,I use mine every day and to be honest for the price its a no brainer.

Go and try one running 2.1 before you buy anything else.

Oh and you can 'sideload' kindle