“Steve Jobs famously dissed 7-inch tablets. They’re ‘tweeners’ he said — “too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad.” Yet inside sources have reported that Apple has been working on small-tablet reference designs since 2009,” Christina Bonnington writes for Wired.
“Initial reports came from dubious overseas supply-chain leaks, but now even the New York Times reports that a small iPad — a 7.85-incher, to be precise — is being readied for production,” Bonnington writes. ‘ Apparently Chinese laborers are even lining up at Foxconn for a chance to build the new device. So what the heck has happened since Steve Jobs said, ‘7-inch tablets are going to be DOA?'”
Bonnington writes, “With an upcoming iTunes and App Store redesign in the works, Apple is primed to step in and take the smaller tablet space by storm. ‘This is the perfect time for Apple to compete with a smaller, cheaper tablet,’ Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Wired. ”
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MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs publicly dismissed many things until he was ready to release them.
MacDailyNews Take: [Steve Jobs] would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180 degree polar position the day before. He was fantastic at that. It was an art. You would never know that he thought the opposite. I saw it daily, I saw it daily. And this is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change. – Tim Cook, Apple CEO, May 29, 2012