Apple to show 'a little more' at Oct. 23 'iPad mini' event - Page 2

This is probably wrong but there are 7 colors bands on the invitation if you count the one running down the middle.  Signifying the 7" device? (rounding down ;) )

How about you wait until an actual product is announced before you diss it and the CEO etc

 

Oh, so you don't think the iPad mini is appropriate for schools? That's one of the big things its proponents are pushing: its "suitability" for the classroom. 

 

I don't disagree with you at all; I'm just saying.

 

Well, certainly the CEO, at least. 😉

It could mean a slimmer iMac and Mac mini. Or iTunes. Or who knows.

My own feeling is that the target audience isn't the "I want a smaller iPad" but the "I-want-a-bigger-iPod Touch-that isn't-an-iPad".

 

I always turn-up on time for my medical appointments but find that the surgery/clinic/hospital is always running 20-30 minutes late. My iPhone just isn't the best device for reading, and I don't want to be toting the iPad around, so iPad-mini would be ideal for me.

 

This.

 

 

(And... one more thing;-)  along with these words too:   "Available.... Today."

With the announcement of Surface RT pricing, I'm expecting the same on the 23rd.  The low price announcement, as Apple kneecaps the competition with their ability to profit  through supply chain wizardry and component reuse.   It killed the Zune HD, and stuffed the Android Tablet market back 2 years.  Time for another swing of the pricing axe (yes, that legal monopoly, iOS and the apple ecosystem... as long as Apple is non exclusive on Apps and Media arrangements, then Everyone can build their own tablet/pad/phone/mediastore/appstore/OTA sync to compete).

 

 

This would be less about wowing the followers, but striking fear in the heart of competitors.  Entering the Holiday season, effectively driving every other competitor's profit estimation down, while driving a fabric of prices on iOS devices from .99 to 699, and then a MacBook Air pinching the top end of any Surface RT line (why buy a half baked Windows device, when you can get a full Intel laptop that weighs practically nothing more that can emulate windows completely for a couple hundred more?).

at least "a little more" doesn't suggest a big screen apple tv :p

for me:
a new mac mini, please!

you read too much into this.

 

iPad Mini (little) and a few 'more' things

SJ was often overruled on pricing. Read some of the historical data and you will see that he wasn't personally happy with the original price on the Mac. Steve very much wanted to change the world with electronics and you can't do that is stuff is so expensive that it is priced out of people's reach. The problem for any company, especially a startup, is being able to price your product with enough margin to drive growth. It is very much a balancing act.

As to iPads profit margin, I don't think Apple is hurting here. They seemed to have found the optimal price point that makes it very difficult for the competition to get a toe hold. At the same time they are getting significant profits to drive iOS development and new products.

In a nut shell those people that believe that Steve wanted to sell products with artificially high prices really don't know Apples history well. Apple has always focused on profitable selling points which frankly has allowed them to survive while hundreds of other companies have failed.

Maybe Apple should refresh the entire product line once every year at the same time - and have a several day event - iOS devices one day - Consumer Devices the next - and Prosumer/Education the next. It would simplify things tremendously. Maybe add a fourth day focused on Software. heck why not make it a week long and invite industry partners to showcase their wares as well. They could hold it near to Cupertino maybe in San Fran Cisco and I dunno call it AppleWorld (I was going to write MacWorld - but I think that is already taken and since the Mac is now only one component of a larger picture it doesn't quite work). 

 

Maybe the tagline for this event should have been along the lines of We have a little something to show you. But perhaps the "more" is a hint at multiple devices across the product line that are in some way more compact than premium offerings. 

 

Ooh - what if they are releasing a "Surface" device that runs Windows 8 natively... but then that wouldn't be little in most respects I suppose. But man would that be fun - an Apple device that can run MacOS/iOS and Windows 8 - and leave MS wondering why they can't make up for the loss on each tablet with volume of sales. 

 

Edited by Dick Applebaum - 10/16/12 at 10:46am

 

 

They could.  Someone pointed out that if they don't use the new in-cell touch panels there aren't any supply constraints and it's rather old tech so yields are high and prices lower.  It's been around since the iphone 4.

 

No, it doesn't.  If UI elements are too small for the retina mini then they would be too small for the non-retina mini as well.  iPad apps are designed against 1024x768 POINTS and not 1024x768 pixels or 2048x1536 pixels.  Type will be smaller but not horribly so...72% of the original size.  Us older folks will prefer the 10" iPads but no one else will have much of an issue.

I could be coerced into buying a new Mac mini.

 

 

Well played!

Well, sure. I just hate for someone really looking at those numbers, thinking they're real, and making plans based upon them to be disappointed, or frustrated, if the pricing is higher. We can see people coming here looking for real answers, and thinking they are here, when they likely aren't.

 

Well, for content you can already get a Wi-Drive.

 

For apps, it's a bit of an annoyance but you can pull down apps via the net.

 

Regarding iTunes...I don't want iTunes as a home server.  I want an appliance as a home server.  An aTV/Time Capsule hybrid becoming the home server would be fine to me.

 

Something that I can dump a lot of photos and movies on and manipulate with the 10" iPad using the CPU and GPU of both iPad and server when running iPhoto and iMovie.

 

 

By Geoff, I think you've got it!

My guess is a "little" iPad that does a whole lot "More" (than the competition??).

It really depends upon the classroom doesn't it? However I'm still convinced that a 7" iPad will be a huge hit with business. Effectively it becomes an electronic replacement for a Daytimer

Beyond that everybody ignores the significant market out there for E-Book readers. A very large number of people buy Amazon devices for nothing more that a device to read books on. I actually think Apple will have to work hard to capture this market. A key selling point would likely be the devices flexibility.
It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out over the next few months. Personally I can't imagine Apple being successful with some of the configurations suggested in these forums. I'm seeing Apple pulling out the technology stops to make sure competing devices just look poor next to this device. Mini is where I expect that Sharps new screens are going for example, retina or not I'm expecting a big step forward.

Schools have a lot of uses for technology. I worked with the NYC schools since my daughter began kindergarten. I was a technology consultant, and helped write the technology plans over the years. I was in a lot of schools doing evaluations, getting wired, and then wireless networking in place, training the trainers, etc.

These will be very helpful in a school system, particularly in the lower grades from K-3. I'm willing to bet that the companies writing professional iPad software, and there are a lot of them, will be busily adapting software for the smaller tablet. No doubt of that.

But as for "standard" textbooks, well, that's a different story. A well written textbook, electronic or otherwise, has the text and graphics (photo's, or whatever) in the proper spot in relation to the text. With a 10" iPad, that fairly easy to do, esp. with the retina model. But with a small screen, they will have to rethink it entirely. For younger children, regular texts are simpler, and can be reworked more easily, but more conventional textbooks, that are more information dense, will be more difficult. You can't simply allow the text and graphics to flow over the pages.

Exactly, who knows? Only the Shadow knows, but he's dead, so we can't ask him.

 

Yes!   The Apple I retailed for $666.   AIR, I paid $1,600 for my 8K RAM Apple ][ in July 1978.   At that time, $1,600 was slightly more than the top-of-the-line DVR.  An IBM 360 Maimframe leased for several thousands of dollars per month.  Those prices would be 3-5 x in today's dollars.

 

The thought of an iPad Mini for ~$199 blows me away.

 

On the first day of AppleMas my true love sent to me,

an iPad and a Surface parody...

Awesome. Now that invites are out- is the iPad mini a reality- I thought no way, but now with invites finally.....

I really don't think the screen is an issue. They could be using a number of different technologies, some bleeding edge. Thanks for trying to point this out, but frankly I don't think people grasp this fact. IOS is not pixel based. However type should not be any smaller unless the UI element displaying it has also shrunk.

If anybody out there has actually kept up with the SDK and Apples guidelines they would realize that Apple has been warning developers for years not to assume specific resolutions. Thus apps that have followed the guidelines and used the SDK properly should have little trouble on the iPad Mini. The worst apps will be those with lots of bit maps.

I wonder just how accurate those "histories" are. As CEO, at least since he came back, I can't see him being overruled on anything that wasn't of a required legal nature.

He stated that Apple was making smaller margins on iPads than they were on other products (major products). I'm sure that was his doing. But lower margins doesn't mean LOW margins. And overall, last year, Apple's net was around 24%, not exactly a squeaker.

That would have been too easy.

And they had to stress the fact that they have a LITTLE more to show, hence smaller iPad.

 

That makes me doubt that we'll see anything else.

 

Yeah... I worked for IBM when they introduced their Selectric® 'Golf Ball" typewriter.  IBM has a quite long and rigorous Pricing Forecasting procedure... sometimes requireing several passes through the process.  The story goes, that after the second pass, they came up with the "optimal" price to sell the most units, generating the largest possible profit...

 

When this price was presented to the IBM CEO (AIR, it was 'young Tom'), he said:  "Double it!".

 

Sales and profits went through the roof and the machine was backordered for months,

 

So much for the science of pricing and forecasting!

It will probably be $299 but the price doesn't really matter much. The fact is even today's iPad is an excellent value. It is literally more powerful than the majority of the computers I've owned over the years. More importantly it is far more usable and transportable.

Somebody made a comparison of an iPad to the original Cray supercomputers. If I remember correctly it is about 2X faster. That says a lot right there. Now admittedly there are much faster PCs available today but very few that can beat iPads other qualities.

If anything- it will be higher priced. Instead of speculating- why not use real numbers. What is cheaper since Tim took over? Nada (unless you include a $100 drop on a 13" air). Yet the iPod touch is the best ever and costs a $100 premium over previous models (with much more memory of course).

Tim has been awesome so far. Stop living in the past and making claims based on nothing.

My guess is colored accessories such as a mini Smart Covers.

 

Silent update on the store on the 23rd...perhaps an offhand remark at the event but probably they don't want to divert the attention away from the "lilttle" things...

Lack of secrecy? Are you kidding?

We've seen no parts of the mini. None. Just hearsay and words at a time where apple is at its most popular and everyone has a pocket camera in their phone.

If the mini is released, This is the most secure release in the modern age when all I considered!

 

I agree that the physical device should be an appliance with staging between local storage and cloud backup.

 

But the concept of managing the content from purchase, backup, sync, to distribution among many devices requires some more sophisticated software.

 

For example, it would be nice if we could schedule for a date/time certain -- the availability of book chapters, multiplayer games, photos, etc. on our iDevices -- so they would be ready and primed to go for the activity at hand.

 

BTW, nothing says that iTunes has to run on a Mac...  an ATV/Time Capsule accessed from an iPad screen would fit the bill, nicely.

Well that was a discussion about the original Mac so it was some time ago. I believe it was on the folklore site but I could be wrong.

As a CEO Jobs would have the last say obviously but even a CEO doesn't always get what he wants. The numbers still have to work in the end.
I often state that Steve was a great salesman with one of his great strengths being the ability to twist the facts to make his case. Apple isn't hurting with iPad pricing but they certainly are hurting the competition. I actually think the whole company is actually happy to be in a position where they can actually lead the market while actually making a profit.

Apple stock is dropping and for a little iPad, a little event at a little theatre in San Jose so the Apple executives don't have to drive far and don't miss much work!

Someone pointed out? Not really. If Apple is pricing this at $250, there's no way a retina screen will be included. Sorry, but I don't agree on that pricing. They are having problems as it is.

I've got a lot of retina apps for my iPad that have small type that's simply too small to read if its used on a small screen. The UI would have to be reworked, as retina apps have a lot more information density than do older iPad apps.

It isn't a given that there will be no retina. In fact I suspect Apple is working real hard to deliver just that in the Mini The size of the type would not change.
Not really. The screen and text on iOS devices is not drawn in pixels. Unless the app uses a lot of bit maps the textural appearance should look relatively the same.

The problem is still going to be screen density. There is more information in my retina apps than the older versions. So as far as Apple's supposed guidelines go, they haven't taken that into account.

So what happens when type on a full sized screen is brought down to a small screen. Type size requirements go out the window, so to speak. So do complex mathematical equations. I've got a number of those apps. They were hard to read on the 10" iPad 2. Much better now. But no matter how we look at it, it will be much harder on a small screen. Those apps have slightly smaller numbers, and letters than before, but with much higher detail, making them easier to read. That will be much worse on the small, low Rez screen.

 

You are probably right!

 

But, I would like to see Apple set the price so that they own the market (again) for the next 2-3 years.  The original $499 price did just that.  I'am certain that, when setting the price bar in 2010, Apple recognized the fact that they would need to do this again in a few years. 

 

In essence, Apple would be saying to customers and competitors, alike:  "Here is what you should get in a tablet for $199, $249, $299...".