headfuzz said:
My colleague's iPad is very nice, but all things considered is too big for my liking.
It all depends what you want a tablet for. Personally I want one that's portable, and by this I mean will fit in a coat pocket rather than having to carry a bag to keep it with you, is functional as an e-reader, internet browser and capable of playing music and games such as Scrabble.
A 7" tablet fits the bill in this regard. My iPhone and HTC Desire are ok for web browsing, Facebooking and so on while on the move, fit in my pocket and the iPhone is excellent at playing music (insert rant on no gapless mp3 playback on Android here), but they're too small to read text on for any length of time.
Something the size of a paperback is ideal because guess what? Paperbacks have been around for decades and are designed to be read by people on the move! The text is printed at a size that is easily read and it fits in your coat pocket! Amazing!
There is definitely a market for 7" tablets, regardless of what Steve wants you to believe.
Yup, a 7 inch tablet fits in a coat pocket, cargo pants, and all of the great places a novel is carried. I'm a SJ fan, but this line of reasoning is just BS.
Wow, what an incredibly articulate, structured rebuttal. "I'm a fan of Steve Jobs therefore all logical reasoning goes out of the window." I doff my cap to you sir, well and truly won.
On a serious note, I'm a Steve Jobs fan too, yet I am sensible enough to realise that he does drop the ball now and again, and furthermore that he sometimes bends the truth in order to keep shareholders happy or keep the competition guessing. He is an astoundingly astute businessman and for that I salute him.
If Apple don't wish to make a 7" tablet because they can foresee cannibalization of existing iPad and iPod Touch sales, that is a perfectly understandable argument; they have a business model they're happy with and wish to adhere to it. But he's stating that there is no market for 7" tablets when clearly there is, Amazon's 6" Kindle is entirely fit for purpose; give it the additional functionality of an iPad and you've got one amazing product. A portable, multifunctional product that does not require taking a bag around constantly to use.
That iPad advert where the guy is on the back of a scooter with an iPad under his arm is risible. Nobody in their right mind would spend so much on a product and then risk dropping it while in transit like that. On the other hand a 7" version could be used to catch up on the morning's paper, or a chapter or 2 of a novel on the train or bus on the way to work, then popped in the pocket and used as an iPod on the walk between station and office. Or indeed the scooter rider in Apple's aforementioned advert could pop it in their inside coat pocket, pop the headphones in to hear voice instructions and use it as a sat nav to get about.
Saying that a 7" touchscreen is unusable when they produce a 3.5" odd touchscreen device running the same user interface is ludicrous. Millions upon millions of iPod Touch sales have shown us that the UI works just fine on a screen smaller than 10" and the device does not have to be a phone to justify huge sales.
That Apple do not wish to cannibalize sales of their existing products nor develop one that doesn't scale to exactly double it's original size as the iPhone/iPod Touch apps do on an iPad is a separate matter to whether there is a market for such a device. It's the same as the upgradeable headless Mac argument.
Lest we forget Steve also tried telling us that Firewire was not needed in the only generation of aluminium Macbook and what happened there? The very next refresh saw a virtually IDENTICAL product, rebranded as a 13" Macbook Pro, but with the addition of a Firewire 800 port.
He also said in January the Google TV give-them-another-set-top-box-on-top-of-the-free-one-they-already-have rental/subscription model was doomed to failure, yet here we are with a new model of
TV that lo and behold is another set top box that operates on a rental/subscription model. Why? For the purpose of keeping up with the Schmidts? It seems illogical to badmouth a paradigm then go right ahead and conform to it.
He very very rarely admits he's wrong but is still only human. A very clever human, but a human nonetheless.
Just because Apple apparently aren't willing to produce a 7" tablet doesn't mean there isn't a market for one. Perhaps once we see some competition from established manufacturers, running newer versions of Android, who Google themselves admit is not currently optimised for tablets, rather than the current slew of products from tupenny generic Chinese factories we'll see a change in stance from Apple.
A bit of logical thinking instead of simply doing what you're told all the time goes a long way. But then, I guess it takes all sorts to make a world, including sheep.
