“Back in 2010, Steve Jobs scoffed at the ‘current crop of seven-inch tablets,’ calling them ‘dead on arrival,'” Ben Taylor writes for TIME. “‘There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users can reliably tap, flick, or pinch them,’ he said on an October earnings call. ‘This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.’
“What a difference three years makes. The 7.85-inch iPad Mini has been a runaway success, and the new iPad Mini with Retina Display seems poised to become the company’s best-selling tablet,” Taylor writes. “Surely even Jobs would now admit that the 7.85-inch Mini deserves its place in Apple’s tablet lineup.”
“That said, Jobs’ poor instincts might actually go a level deeper,” Taylor writes. “Not only have 7-inch tablets proven their worth—they might just be the superior tablet size, period. First, there are the sales numbers, where the iPad Mini has reportedly cannibalized its bigger brother faster than Apple expected. Next, there’s feedback from users.”
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs said a lot of things for competitive purposes.
Plus, 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. That’s right, Google’s Nexus 7 offers a display that’s just 73.5% of Apple’s iPad mini.
Steve Jobs was talking about 7-inch tablets with the wrong aspect ratios as being poor tablets, not 7.85-inch iPads with the proper aspect ratio.
The king of the “mini” tablets is Apple’s iPad mini with Retina display. Period.
Apple iPad mini 7.9-inch display area vs. Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD display area
[UPDATE: 10:178pm EST: Corrected percentage to “73.5%.”
