Did you account for the A5/6X and heat dissipation? Did you account for how the changes in size and weight would affect usability? Did you account for the impact of the higher price point on demand?
Hardly an "easy" question.
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iPad mini I just returned my Mini and here is why
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Did you account for the A5/6X and heat dissipation? Did you account for how the changes in size and weight would affect usability? Did you account for the impact of the higher price point on demand?
Hardly an "easy" question.
Yet he talked crap about tablets in general. So in theory Steve Jobs wouldn't have released the first regular iPad or the 2nd iPad either. It's likely that the mini was already in testing and development at least a year before Steve Jobs died last year....as court testimony and documents indicate.
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As technology improves, you can do things that you didn't think you could do in the past. Why is this surprising?
How is this a hard question to answer? Did you use brain before you posted?
The total battery capacity quadrupled. They could put 4 of everything and still maintain the same battery run time. So they could put the equivalent 4x A5 and still maintain the same battery run-time. The A5X is decidedly not even close to 4 times the power consumption.
As for heat dissipation, the same principles apply. 4 times the surface area to dissipate up to 4 times the power consumption.
As technology improves, you can do things that you didn't think you could do in the past. Why is this surprising?
It's not hard to grasp but people saying Steve Jobs would never have released a mini iPad based on Steve Jobs' previous statements have no idea what they are talking about. I just wanted to point it out.
The retail price does not matter... the cost to build does
iphone 5 is about $200 to make of which $44 goes for the screen
ipad mini cost $188
ipad mini with retina would have cost $246
If both versions were offered mini @ 329 and Retina @ 379 I believe that the retina would have outsold the one currently offered. If they offered just the Retina Mini @ $350 all of you still would have bought one plus all of those people that aren't because it doesn't have one. the profit loss would have been made up in volume
Agree with most of your points but I think Apple is banking on the fact that these people who bought the original mini will also buy the Retina mini and thus they will make even more money in the long run.
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Except they wanted the runtime of an iPad. Not an iPhone.
And yet the iPad 3 was criticized for running hot. Hmm.
Why did you ignore the other questions? Are price points and size irrelevant?
Except that a hypothetical Retina mini would far exceed 10 hours runtime considering Apple would not put 4 baseband processors, 4 GPS chips, 4 touchscreen controllers etc. Also note that the A6 uses significantly less power than the A5X despite equivalent GPS power and double the CPU power.
Heat is mostly dissipated locally actually so surface area is not going to matter. The only reason why it was so prominent on the ipad 3 is because it was located in a conspicuous place. Add the power sipping nature of the A6 and it shouldn't even matter.
Price-points is technologically irrelevant. Yes. I didn't bother explaining size since it should be pretty obvious wtf to do with the power savings above. The Retina ipad mini might be 0.1" thicker max but no one is going to give a flying poo about that.
Man. This thread. Amazing the bartender has not showed up with the suggestion to take it outside already.
But the thread's still open so here goes: I did not return my mini. I read the specs and the price tags and made my choice and hit the BUY button. When the packages arrived (yes I got a smartcover also), I opened them, topped off the charge, booted the thing, loaded it up with some of my media and apps, played with it, played with the smartcover as stand and as bookjacket, turned on the bluetooth to make sure it worked ok with a jambox and some bt accs like my keyboards and mice etc., watched a movie and a keynote, fetched the weather and a recipe for lentils w/ mushrooms for the next day's lunch, and went to bed leaving it to play music to the cat all night, which it did.
I was satisfied with my unboxing and usage trials. I'm still delighted. My iPad mini is staying here. Sorry some of you feel otherwise, but this is my two cents and I'm pretty sure it's the two cents of a lot of other people too.
Although I can understand that some here feel Apple priced the thing wrong for the hardware, it's actually the marketplace that will make that decision. It's our wallets, not our words that translate our opinion in that venue.
Some people only post to MacRumors forums when they have a negative opinion about something they bought, or have decided they do not want to buy, but you can also still post here when you bought some Apple gear and happen to like it. Wonders never cease.
But the thread's still open so here goes: I did not return my mini. I read the specs and the price tags and made my choice and hit the BUY button. When the packages arrived (yes I got a smartcover also), I opened them, topped off the charge, booted the thing, loaded it up with some of my media and apps, played with it, played with the smartcover as stand and as bookjacket, turned on the bluetooth to make sure it worked ok with a jambox and some bt accs like my keyboards and mice etc., watched a movie and a keynote, fetched the weather and a recipe for lentils w/ mushrooms for the next day's lunch, and went to bed leaving it to play music to the cat all night, which it did.
I was satisfied with my unboxing and usage trials. I'm still delighted. My iPad mini is staying here. Sorry some of you feel otherwise, but this is my two cents and I'm pretty sure it's the two cents of a lot of other people too.
Although I can understand that some here feel Apple priced the thing wrong for the hardware, it's actually the marketplace that will make that decision. It's our wallets, not our words that translate our opinion in that venue.
Some people only post to MacRumors forums when they have a negative opinion about something they bought, or have decided they do not want to buy, but you can also still post here when you bought some Apple gear and happen to like it. Wonders never cease.
If it were that easy, they would have sold the phones with the ability to clip together and grow like Voltron.
Hint: It's not that easy.
All of which will use a small percentage of the battery life. I'm sure you know that the GPU and screen will use the vast majority of the power. And they will have more than 5 times the number of pixels of an iPhone 4S to deal with. Your made up numbers aside.
And yet you previously said "As for heat dissipation, the same principles apply. 4 times the surface area to dissipate up to 4 times the power consumption." Makes me think you are just saying whatever justifies your argument.
That's a very convenient argument. No one is rationally denying that the display technology exists. It's the same display as the iPhone 4+ cut to a new size. The technological problem is fitting that display into the iPod mini form factor at a desirable price point while maintaining features and usability.
Hey! Look! You just made up another number!
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Why? Because you say so?
Maybe they're keeping it around because it's still selling extremely well, despite there being a Retina variant next to it.
Most of the market does not care about specs. They go in, they look to see what works for them and they walk out with a purchase if they find something.
The GPU and screen does not consume the vast majority of the power budget, despite what you may have read on these forums. Besides the display, the #2 consumer on a mobile device is the cellular radio.
The screen uses, conservatively, 50% of the device power budget. On typical devices, this number is closer to 30%.
Likewise, the CPU/GPU typically uses up 15-20% of the budget.
Don't believe me? Learn to Google.
That is an ideal scenario, which is to assume that heat conductance does not play any part in heat dissipation. Obviously the real world materials do not conduct heat infinitely well, so I refined it a bit.
Anyways the refined scenario plays in your favor more, as I agree the iPad3 does heat up, but it's not dangerous or uncomfortable so I'm not sure what you're complaining about here.
Compared to competitor tablets which provide similar hardware at significantly reduced price points, I don't see why this is so hard to understand.
I'm the one making up numbers? Lol. At least I provide numbers. You just make claims without even pretending to back them up with assertions or facts. APPLE CANT DO IT. NOOOOO.
I'm facepalming at all of the replies.
BTW, price is a HUGE factor in deciding what to produce and push into market. It's obviously not as simple as cutting these panels to whatever size the resulting product demands otherwise we'd have 326 dpi 80" Ultra HDTV's because it's possible.
Also, making up numbers is not the same as providing numbers just like putting random letters together doesn't form words.
Apple is making $130 more than competitors on essentially equivalent hardware. Cry me a river. The yield rate on 7.9inch 2048x1536 won't be so low that it will make it essentially impossible to make. Nice use of Reductio Ad Absurdum
I'm not going to provide verification for the numbers when you can Google it yourself.
Yes. Apple is making $130 profit on each device whereas other competitors are hoping to sell media after they hook the consumer to their own devices. I don't see what that has to do with R&D and manufacturing costs though.
Like most companies, one would assume they push something new out from as much existing tech as possible, if it gets a good reception, throw more money into R&D for it and hope for another hit at a later date.
No one that has a mini and likes it is crying about the price or the tech. It seems like the only people getting butt hurt over this are people who want to own an Apple branded product but can't get past the spec envy for whatever reasons.
How does the fact that your numbers claim that the screen and processor use 45-70% of battery life prove my statement wrong? Especially if the cellular radio is on standby. For example, when looking a web surfing over wifi.
Complaining? Just bringing up a potential issue that you are not accounting for. The same heat in a much smaller volume could be a problem. Especially as it interacts with other parts in closer proximity.
Because you are not considering the practical concerns. For example, iPad mini would need to have a significantly higher resolution display than any of its competitors to maintain app compatibility. And even more pointedly, competitors are selling at cost.
I've provided clear examples to illustrate my claims. Making up numbers isn't better than no numbers.
Nice strawman. Nobody is crying for Apple. The just understand that Apple has business interests.
Another strawman. Nobody is claiming otherwise.
Fantastic! You want us to Google specs of a device that doesn't exist.
I only said it because you brought up engineering. It is a technical barrier, Apple buys components, not designs them. If nobody has a screen like this, Apple can't buy it. I'd like you to point out the component Apple could have bought instead for a retina mini display. Go ahead and find it, I'll wait here. But if you can't find it, don't claim it could have been done.
How about the barrier which is: it's the first gen of a 'new' device. The cheaper it is made, the better, as the water is being tested to see if it will sell. It's sells well: future investment in a retina display. It doesn't: screen stays the same! (I think we know it is selling loads though)
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DVD video looks pretty damn good until you are used to HDTV. SDTV is pretty much unbearable now. Not many people are going to buy an SDTV at any price these days.
9600bps modems were awesome until we upgraded to 28.8kbps. I don't know anyone who would have spent money on a 9600 or 14.4 modem once the 28.8 modems were in a reasonable price range.
I'm sure that silent movies were also awe-inspiring at one point, as well as the horse-and-buggy and the telegraph.
The fact is, text has looked very poor on small, relatively low resolution LCD panels since day one. It simply took seeing the superior alternative to make us realize how poor it truly is. The low resolution panel stands out even more considering we have a higher resolution display on our iPhones.
Actually, in a sense it does, because in order to get the same brightness in the middle of the display on a much larger, edge-lit screen, you need to pump much more light in because there is a lot of loss in the light guides. In other words, in order to get the same flux density on a bigger display, you need to pump proportionally more power into it.
No doubt. And they'd have sold even more at $199. But that's just not the way it works. There is absolutely no business reason why they would not have released a retina mini at $399 or even $499 if they were able to do so now. They gain nothing by not doing it. The reason is that no such product can justifiedly exist in November 2012, even at those prices.
Let's pretend that $246 is indeed the magic number for a moment (more on that below), and let's also be generous to you and use fixed dollars for operating margin instead of percentages, assuming the mini is expected to toe the line at 20% net (Apple has actually told investors that the mini doesn't meet the corporate average, so again, another generous concession). That's $65.80 in net profit on the $329 base model, meaning that their per-unit overhead is $75.20 on top of the $188 components bill.
His pretend retina mini costs $58 more in parts. At $379 retail and holding the same 20% profit, that leaves $303.20 to pay for everything else. 246+75.20 is $321.20. You're $18 short at $379 and $42 short at $349. $399 is the price point that is closest to breaking even costwise assuming a $58 parts increase. And that also lowers the gross margin from 43% to 38% in the process, which is an unrealistic expectation. $429 is the match at 43%, again assuming that the parts increase is only $58.
They would not sell four times as many units by going to a retina display and pricing it at $350--in fact, they might not net any more units, since the number of people who won't buy it without a retina display might easily be the same size as the number of people who absolutely wouldn't pay more than $330 for an iPad mini. That would cost them $37 million for every million units sold.
You can't make up a net loss in volume; you can only lose more by selling more. Even discounting your net profit to a smaller, but still positive number, is only worthwhile if it results in a much bigger volume increase. In other words, in most cases, it's better to sell fewer units at higher margin than more at a lower margin.
There is no way that $379 would work, even assuming the parts actually existed in the first place. Cult of Mac is just plain wrong. The article understates the cost math and relies on completely arbitrary fantasies about Apple taking a lower margin. And his math doesn't even add up.
He's looking at the total display cost rather than the touchscreen and LCD separately, which skews the results. The iPad mini uses a much more expensive touchscreen than the phones, accounting for a much larger share of its $80 price ($25-35). The LCD component estimate from his sources for the 3GS is $19 and $28.50 for the iPhone 4. Even if 326ppi costs have now fallen to ~$23 based on his cost projections over time, the resulting display is at least $117 for just the LCD, or an absolute minimum of $142 with touchscreen. Quite a bit more than the $123.62 he claims. Given that, even with his fantasy "slim" margin of 37%, that's a retail price of $415+. With the same 43% it has now, that's $463+.
It's also odd that he didn't use the iPhone 5 as the basis of his math (but again, this is because doing so would highlight how big the price gap actually is). Using his flawed methodology on the $44 iPhone 5 display runs to $191 on the mini, an additional $67 over his "estimate" pushing that "$246" to a staggering $313 (for a retail price of $491 using his fantasy 37% margin, or $548 using the mini's actual margin.
I don't know if he's being intentionally misleading to drum up page hits or if he just doesn't know what he's calculating, but either way, even using his own sources and assumptions, there is no support for a $379 retina mini.
Exactly.
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