Apple Working with Suppliers on 8-Inch iPad

[Bodypainter]

If you look at the picture that MacRumors provided. Just by scaling down the same picture by like 20% you are not getting a smaller iPad! Stop all the rumors. I don't know how many time this rumor floats and everyone has same comments. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! It just doesn't make sense. Apple is not in business of building remote controls (Wozniak did that when he left Apple year ago) and they are not in OEM business to provide car manufacturers in-dash display.

Let's leave those small screen form factor for Android tablets! Give it a rest - There is and there will be no Mini iPad!

IT WILL HAPPEN! How large is an iPad for kids? It is as if you carry around a device that's twice as large and twice as heavy! Would you like that? No!

The 8 inch iPad is for kids, and it is cheaper to produce and affordable for the education market. Apple should have introduced it at their last textbook keynote, but they didn't want to destroy the demand for iPad 3.

First the iPad 3 will come, then (June?) the iPad mini will come!!!

 

[kdarling]

Random thoughts:

Re: education market. I sometimes wonder if Apple shouldn't just make a special school version without camera, say, and locked to the textbook App Store.

That way, the schools would buy those, but parents would still need to buy a home version for other uses.

Re: 8". Those of us who use multiple sizes daily, already know that there's a time and place where 10" works great. and likewise for smaller devices. It's no different than the way we have large magazines and smaller paperback books.

As far as app fragmentation, Apple has already proved with the Retina and iPad 1/2 (not to mention the great Intel conversion) that they're quite willing to force developers to create new versions.

 

[MythicFrost]

It might eat some sales and yet, it will in all likelihood generate new sales (me for one possibly).

Perhaps, but it's unlikely to produce enough new sales to outweigh the negatives. (Perhaps not even enough to even be worth the effort, negatives aside.)

 

[Bear]

Perhaps, but it's unlikely to produce enough new sales to outweigh the negatives. (Perhaps not even enough to even be worth the effort, negatives aside.)

Funny I haven't seen any real negatives of an 8" iPad. And I suspect there will be more sales than some people think there will be.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Perhaps, but it's unlikely to produce enough new sales to outweigh the negatives. (Perhaps not even enough to even be worth the effort, negatives aside.)

Honestly I think an 8 in would be fine bull all in all I would find a 7 in to be a better size. It is farther removed from the current iPad size.
Reason that I say that is look at the other OS and tablet sizes. People clearly liking the smaller size for traveling. It pretty much just more choices.

 

[MythicFrost]

Funny I haven't seen any real negatives of an 8" iPad. And I suspect there will be more sales than some people think there will be.

There's quite a lot of negatives, such as eating into the sales of the 9.7 inch iPad, bringing few new sales despite costs for designing the new one, and depending on whether or not they keep the same resolution, fragmentation and additional hurdles for developers.

Remember it's not about sales, but new sales. Are there enough people out there who won't buy a 9.7 inch iPad but will buy an 8 inch iPad? Personally, I don't think so.

I remember reading an article talking about when Apple was deciding the right screen size and resolution for the iPad, and if I remember correctly, a bunch of the top level design team spent about two weeks or more locked in a room with 20 iPads with different screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios -- they ultimately chose the 1024x768 9.7 inch iPad, and I don't think they're about to come out with not only a second iPad, but one so similar.

Honestly I think an 8 in would be fine bull all in all I would find a 7 in to be a better size. It is farther removed from the current iPad size.
Reason that I say that is look at the other OS and tablet sizes. People clearly liking the smaller size for traveling. It pretty much just more choices.

That may be true but the question isn't whether or not people will buy it, but whether new people will buy it -- people who wouldn't buy a 9.7 inch iPad but would buy a 7 or 8 inch model. Is there enough of them to justify making it? I don't think so. That aside, a new iPad with a smaller screen brings along complications.

 

[Crissov]

1200 dpi now!!1

Not everywhere else no

Of course I exaggerated, but still: on apple.com and in consumer magazines (unlike techie blogs) nobody cares about the details, for them it’s basically “retina = 300+ dpi”.

That’s sad, though, because 1' (one minute of arc) is such a nice rule of thumb, and therefore is mentioned in both articles you linked to, too.

We don’t disagree how one should define a marketing term like “Retina display” and Apple internally and publicly on introduction has correctly done so, but elsewhere it usually is communicated in the dumbed down version and (stupid) people will complain if the screen of the iPad 3 doesn’t match that expectation.

The claim is that Retina basically means you can't see the individual pixels.

Sure, in normal use. If we took that to its absolute extreme, though, we would have to use the minimum distance from object to eye (i.e. retina ) instead of “10 to 12 inches”. That would be about 7cm for children and more for adults.

If we do the math, we find that basically nobody could make out individual pixels with a resolution of 1200 px/in or more. For absolutely everyone with perfect vision (0.6') and accommodation you would have to go as detailed as 2000 px/in.

That’d be a true “retina display”. When manufacturers can build displays like that with pixels less than 20 µm wide and high, they won’t have to try harder any more (unless our Alien Overlords have better eyes than us or we start serious cybernetic bioengineering). Consumer printers are already there and hence are hardly improved in this regard nowadays.

 

[TheSlush]

No way. Not believing this.

 

[Crissov]

Tab, Pad, Board

Those of us who use multiple sizes daily, already know that there's a time and place where 10" works great. and likewise for smaller devices.

At Xerox PARC they predicted three major device classes for ubiquitous computing in the 21st century: tab, pad and board.

They couldn’t foresee every development that followed, e.g. the personal handheld electronic device almost everyone nowadays carries around (and currently still calls a “smartphone”) is not really the same as their “tab”, because they were thought to be non-personalized. Current tablets, however, come close to their idea of a “pad”. Neither desktop computers nor TVs nor interactive whiteboards are already really what they call a “board” – the MS Surface table comes closest.