Steve Jobs has sadly almost crushed hope for a 7-inch iPad, when he said: "One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen," Jobs said during the call. "This is far from the truth: 7-inch screens are 45 percent as large as an iPad...this size isn't sufficient for making great tablet apps."
Well, apart from Steve's many famous 180-turn-arounds*, this is complex, innit? For example, if a 7-inch iPad were to have the same amount of pixels as the ten-incher, it might have almost the same value, at least for those with good eyes and slim fingers, no?
Also, to follow Steve's math: an iPhone has only 1/8 the area of the iPad. Does Steve really believe that the iPhone is only 1/8 as good as the iPad? If so, why did he put the phone in the forefront several years ago when they were actually working on a tablet first? And why does it cost about the same as an iPad? (In fact I think that's a good question. Why is it more than twice the price of an iPod Touch? The Touch has almost all the features.)
To be honest, the essence for me is getting a 350-gram iPad (12.5 oz). 7-inch or 10-inch, no biggie. But yeah, bigger screen is better, if not for the durn weight when it's a hand-held device.
*And these examples don't even include my favorite: the the original "lamp" iMac, the first flat-panel iPad, when it came out he said that the reason they had separated the screen from the processor and disk and drive, was that the latter do not work well in a vertical position, so they'd decided to "let each unit be what it wanted to be". Woopsy, two years later, we have a slab iMac with all the drives vertical! Whuhapp'ned?
5 comments:
The G4 iMac did not sell well. At least that's my understanding. Around the same time, the cube was not selling well. So Apple went to a more conventional iMac design with the G5. The new design was also easier and cheaper to make.
I too would like a lighter iPad. But I think having the first iPad be overbuilt is a good idea, in order to gain people's trust and confidence. This is going to be a device like the Mac Plus that will be in use for many, many years. It will be very hard for anyone to regret buying one because of lack of quality or durability. With a brand new type of device I think that's important.
I can see that argument, and I certainly like quality.
But you might say that Amazon went the other way with the Kindle, and that's not harmed it, it seems.
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If the dome was not selling well, I can see it. Probably also it might have been hard to support a 27-inch screen, I dunno. I'm just making fun of Steve saying "this is the right way to do it," and then just reverse it later.
And the latest iPod presentation: "it turned out people missed the buttons, so we put them back... Now, the Nano: we have removed the buttons..."
(Should be 49%, not 45%. If you're going to round to the nearest 5%, you'd get 50%. I don't know why you would round down from 49% to 45% rather than up to 50%.
Unless you're just playing deceptive games with numbers.
The formula is pretty simple. The ratio of the areas of two similar shapes is equal to the ratio of the squares of any chosen linear measurement. For our example, we have this:
The ratio of the diagonals is 7"/10" = 0.7. Square that, and you get 0.7*0.7=0.49.
Quite so. I got the 45% number in one of the articles, and didn't check it.
Now I look at the article again, it was Steve Jobs who said it, not me.
But then it could be that the "7-inch" screen is not quite seven inches, just like the iPad's screen is not quite ten.
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