There are larger issues at stake here than narrow business projections…we are witnessing a retelling of the Iliad, the saga of Achilles’ rage against injustice.

Steve Jobs = Achilles

This price should attract schools,fencesitters, students and big iPad owners etc etc..it will beaffordable and appealing to an even wider market. By it’s usefulness it will also act as a sales agent for the full iPad.

Second, you are all of you assuming Apple will launch a Mini. It is not clear that they will. They never confirmed this. I doubt they will launch a Mini. I think it’s all disinformation and controlled leaks to take attention away from others.

This event will likely be:

13″ Retina MBP
New Mac Mini
Hence the “Little more to show you”
Maybe Retina iMac and updated Pro to boot as well
But no Mini

Nobody needs tweeners, even from Apple. They won’t do it guys.

Apple has a 35% profit on an iPad. Apple can win on price if they want to. Make a 40% smaller product at a 25% profit margin and you have a $200, 16 GB, iPad WiFi.

Its’ just that simple.

Now just go troll in another direction.

“its Mac Pro revamped, and some serious attention placed on the power computing end of the market”
More wrong than mere words can say… We’re in a PostPC world. What that means for the iMac, can’t say, but I’d be willing to bet that if Apple were to update the Pro, the sales in one month of portable devices would outshine a years worth of profits of any updated Pro. There’s a lot of people that would want them, but nowhere near the number of potential iMac and iOS owners.

Apple is already winning the tablet market on price (never mind usability). Manufacturers are having great trouble producing something of equal quality at the same price as apple.

The mini will be no different. Apple can now due to its enormous volume and buying power sell the mini at a price that will be hard to match.

That said, I think $199 is an unlikely entry point for the mini.

Even if there were no iPad mini, production bottlenecks for the iPhone 5 will still exist, until such time production catches up with demand. This is a recurring theme for every iPhone release stretching back to 2007, and the 5 is no exception to this.

As for going for a lower price model and sacrificing profits in the mean time, how do you propose extending the iOS ecosystem if you do not capture the lower end of the market. If you want iOS to remain a niche player like Mac OS X, then by all means only release high priced products. But the network effects of a broad and deep iOS ecosystem by developers developing apps first for the platform will be jeopardised if the market adoption rate drops to below sustainable levels.

The very fact that Apple brought out the iPad has contributed positively to the top and bottom line. Only if you’re losing money selling the iPad does this prospect not make sense, like Microsoft dumping money on search (Bing) and XBox. Clearly this is not the case, Apple is still making money on every iPad mini sold, albeit at lower margins. But that is a function of being in the consumer market – you need a vibrant ecosystem to attract new entrants and maintain existing customers. And a vibrant ecosystem can only result from a broadening of the product base and in doing so broadening the customer base.

Why do you think that at every presentation of new product releases, the latest one being the iPhone 5 launch, Tim Cook stresses the number of iOS devices out there – 400 million at the latest count. Obviously Apple is taking a new tack of pumping out as many cars (mobile devices) as it can while the market is hot for cars. Since the truck (PC/Mac) market has cooled somewhat, Apple will dedicate its resources where it obtains the highest returns.

When HP dumped the WebKit Tablet, and you could get it for $99, I called my wife to see if she wanted one. Her response was, “Does it run iPad apps? If not, no, don’t want it.”

Now, when rumors started popping up about the iPad mini, I didn’t have to say anything to her. She told me about it and has been counting the days.

This is the same person who told me, she HATES Macs and will only use PCs. Well she used Macs in the 90′s before Steve came back and was thoroughly disgusted with lockups and panics. I can’t change her mind.

But the iPad mini is more like the MacBook Air. They’re simply downsizing the iPad in order to create an extremely light and thin and ultra-portable device as can’t be achieved with a 10″ iPad. I believe we will see proportions from the iPad mini in terms of weight and thickness that will never be seen in the regular iPad. This will still be an iPad running spacier, more functional tablet apps compared to other 7 inch tabs relegated to blown up phone apps. It is indeed a premium product that’s a cut above the competition, so I don’t see any bottom feeding here.

Again, like the MacBook Air, the cheaper price is secondary. A welcome side effect. The iPad mini will be borne of the goal of making the iPad as small and thin and light as possible, not creating a cheap tablet. That’s how we’ll know it’s not a sign of Apple losing their way.

Apple has a corporate culture hatred for Google…. If they can start down the path getting rid of Samsung as they are for it’s betrayal believe me they will price this thing to inflict a hurtin on Google…
Mobile search is HUGE …and growing . And owning mobile search will put a hurting on Googles ad revenue something fierce …. It is the reason for Google latest stock drop… Apple is staffed by people…, great people to be sure but people…. And people can be vindictive when they perceive they are the victims of an injustice ….Apple is to smart to hurt themselves, but they are in a unique position to take less profit to inflict damage to the arch enemy… That 100 billion is there for a reason.

Apple has been baited into playing at the cheap, no margin end of the computing spectrum.

Apple cannot win on price, they have an ecosystem to maintain and high quality reputation to uphold. The competition will always underprice their crapware. Now Apple, in a poorly planned strategy, has decided to offer a me-too product to cater to that tiny niche of the market of purse-toting paperback readers who aren’t fit enough to tote around that oh-so-heavy iPad, or are too cheap to buy a fully capable iPad.

Apple would be better served getting its iPhone production straightened out, its Mac Pro revamped, and some serious attention placed on the power computing end of the market that Apple seems to have abandoned to Microsoft: small business, servers, education, eventually corporate servers, etc.

Apple doesn’t have to do that. They can price the iPad mini at $299, get good sales volume and market share doing it, and let Amazon and Google fight over the “we’ll make it up in volume and content purchase” table scraps.

All will be revealed in a few days!

The advantages of the halo effect, sales through the ecosystem are benefit enough to justify a little less profit…. Plus the big benefit of forging ahead with Job’s desire to go “thermonuclear”… This might be the device to create the mushroom cloud.

There’s nowhere to hide this time. Tim Cook’s pulling a Godfather. Tessio, Barzini, Moe Greene… everybody gets whacked.