Originally Posted by
SolipsismX 
Liar liar pants on fire. If you are going to make a claim that it's an
exact quote at least include the
exact sentence not one you truncated.
"This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps."
So he thought that they couldn't go less than 10" (note that the iPad started off less than 10") and they found a way to make the device feasible without hurting the user experience much or at all. People can't have an opinion based on current info and then change their mid when new info is presented?
Scenario:
"Steve, we ran the numbers, if we use the 163 PPI displays in the iPhone and keep the 1024x768 display we can have a reasonably good 7.85" tablet. It's not great like he full-sized iPad in usability as the elements are smaller, but they are about halfway between the iPhone and iPad elements and the new size and weight will come with their own benefits making it a very good tablet for its size, especially when compared to those 7" 16:9 tablets."
"Let's develop this but hold off until we can saturate the current tablet market or we start to see cheaper tablets rise up to a point where good tablet apps are better than nothing in that small tablet market."
Let's recap what else he stated...
"If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on the seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion."
That's for a 7" 16:9 tablet whilst the iPad mini is an 8" 4:3 tablet. That means it has a display area about 40% larger than the tablets he was comparing to. Did Apple make a 7" 16:9 tablet? Do you think Apple will make a 7" 16:9 tablet? If they do you can say Jobs was wrong.
Then he went on to say...
"These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival"
Which one of the 7" tablets shipping at the time were successful? If you said anything other than none of them you're wrong.
).
amazing how most pundits miss what should be obvious - the mini is going to become Apple's top selling iPad, and reinforce its overall tablet leadership.
the pundits carp about the screen. even tho it's actually a very good screen, better than the iPad 2, which is still very adequate (i have one). because it's not the latest and greatest retina quality.
but consumers care much more about convenience, "just works," and price. plus keeping all the apps and iTunes stuff they already have, if they are one of the 100+ million who have already bought an iPad before.
consumers will see the mini as almost as good as the 10" iPad in terms of what it can do, in a much more convenient size, at a price 34% less than the full-size iPad. that's a great package already.
they will buy a ton of them for holiday gifts. no one will feel bad when they unwrap that present!
what Apple did was deliver a V.1 mini that was ready to go now at a price level it intends to maintain for every new mini model in the future, using mostly iPad 2 internals in a new shell to avoid delay. it will sell everyone of those Foxconn can make the rest of this year anyway, so there is no good market reason to charge less.
then pretty early next year - March? - Apple will introduce the V.2 mini with a 326 dpi retina display and A6 chip when screen makers and Foxconn are ready for its volume production. its $330 price will be the same, and this V.1 mini's price will drop to, for example, $250. this price segmentation by model generation is what Apple has done with the iPad, iPod touch, and the iPhone, so it should be obvious that's what it plans for the mini too.
that V.2 mini will be the real "killer" product - pretty close to perfect for a lot of people - and become not only the #1 iPad, but the #1 tablet, period.
(yes, i'm waiting for that one.)