“Apple’s iPad event was pretty unsurprising. It was obvious that the large one would be speed-bumped and get lighter. It was also obvious that the Mini would get retina at some point – the only question was whether the supply chain could deliver enough panels now (with some well-informed people suggesting it could not), and the late-November ship date and $400 price point to how close it was,” Benedict Evans blogs.
“However, the big puzzle is the price the now old Mini is discounted to: $300. This compares poorly to a new Nexus 7, with comparable resolution to the retina Mini, at $230,” Evans writes. “The Nexus 7 is of course being sold at very low margin by Google, but does the old Mini really need to be $300 rather than, say, $275 or $250? What is Apple thinking?”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iPad mini has a 7.9-inch display boasting 29.96 sq. inches of display area. That is 36% larger than Google’s plastic Nexus 7’s tiny 7-inch display’s 22.02 sq. inches. Google’s Nexus 7 offers a display that’s just 64% of Apple’s iPad mini. 64% of Apple’s $299 iPad mini price is $191.36, not $230.
So, why is Google’s tiny-screen Nexus 7 priced so high?
Is it for the privilege of running second-rate Android phone apps blown up to fit the plastic iPad wannabe’s screen while iPad mini users choose from nearly half a million apps that are designed specifically for iPad?
“Apple’s $300 Mini really isn’t a competitive problem, because the iPad doesn’t yet face a strong competitive threat (quite unlike the iPhone). Rather, there are actually two quite different markets: the post-PC vision, where Apple is dominant, and a ultra-low margin product that’s also called a tablet but which is really a totally different product [that are used to watch lots of video and are therefore basically competing with TVs, not iPads.]”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]