Apple had heard tales of some ordinary people who not only didn’t want to spend $500 on a tablet, but also liked a 7-inch screen size too. However it didn’t believe such silly stories, and filed them away in the same drawer as ghosts and goblins. Then, Amazon and Google came up with really cheap 7-inch tablets that sold by the bucket load.
This presented a problem. Apple never thought there was a market for mid-size tablets – Steve Jobs had told them so – but its competitors were proving it wrong. For the first time in a while, Apple needed to react, and in a market it simply didn’t understand.
Research teams were sent to check out these cheap tablets. The results were worrying, as they saw low-cost materials, suspect build quality and worst of all, compromises everywhere they turned. “How,” asked the team, “will we ever compete?”
The answer, as we learned yesterday, is that they won’t.
When Apple’s Phil Schiller took the stage to unveil the iPad Mini, he took direct aim the Nexus and Kindle Fire HD. But the numbers show the new product has no clear advantage over its competitors, and one number more than any other proves that Apple has no interest in engaging Google and Amazon in a race to the bottom, where $199 tablets are sold. The iPad Mini’s starting price is $130 dollars more.
That’s still the cheapest device that Apple has brought to market, outside the iPod line, but by building something to a price point, it couldn’t stuff something new and exciting inside. So we’ve got old, cheap technology in a fancy new skirt. The iPad Mini is a product that was exciting in 2011, when Apple last introduced a tablet with a 1024 x 768 resolution and an A5 chip. Its only trick is to get a bit smaller, a fact Apple even tries to cover up with that guff about it being a “concentration of, not a reduction of the original.” Its only real ace card is the App Store, where 275,000 apps specially designed for a tablet await iPad Mini owners.
The result is a compromised product made the Apple way – expensively – suited to a very particular segment of the market. Those flush with cash will want an new, full-size iPad with its gorgeous Retina display and sparkly new processor, while everyone who wants the best mid-size tablet for the money will buy a Nexus 7. The iPad Mini is for people who fit somewhere in-between, as well as the legions of gurning fans who’ll buy each and every new Apple product regardless.
So is the iPad Mini Apple’s first, true budget device, built down to a price especially for the low-cost crowd? Nope. What we have is a beautifully designed product using technology that has been surpassed by its rivals, along with a user-friendly operating system backed up by the strongest app eco-system in the mobile world, all at a considerably higher price than the perceived competition. In other words, the iPad Mini is a normal Apple product, and it’ll almost certainly sell like one too.
well you sum it all up in the last paragraph, but you sound really bitter almost the whole time. i would have been really happy to see apple release it at $299. but i wont be buying one, because i already have 2 ipads and i love them both.
See, what happens to companies that seem too big too fail !
They lose FOCUS !
Don’t you love commenters who know more than Apple does about its business? Obviously they used to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, none of whom know how to make dollar number 1 off off of hardware in this arena.
What do you mean? You don’t think the iPad mini is priced too high?
I think Apple knows a lot more about what it’s doing than I do. Also, it does not do panic pricing. What the Mini price does quite nicely is cap what Amazon can raise it prices to. And since Amazon makes almost nothing off its hardware, that’s not good news.
And … it’s also bad news to us consumers. Amazon’s business model (price low, take market share, and make it up on ebooks later on) leaves no money or motive for investing in creating anything but cheap hardware or software. Cheap in both senses of the word.
I see I didn’t answer your question. I am sure it’s the best price Apple could do given its spex and costs. Over time, I see that Apple packs a lot of features and quality into its hardware. If the price isn’t what I wished nor are the spex, it means more features and technology were too expensive (retina display, for sure). I don’t want Apple dumpster diving for market share tho’. I enjoy its commitment to creating magical quality. Wouldn’t we all want to be magicians if we could?
I hear ya Steve and I agree that Apple has been very smart with pricing their products in regards to profit margins on both hardware and software sides. I do feel like the iPad Mini should be the company’s loss leader in that there is a lot of competition in this screen size segment and Apple should use a low price to encourage people to get into the Apple eco-system – and then make money off of apps, books etc.
I view the iPad Mini as an iPad 2 (same specs, same low res screen) in a smaller form factor — and that’s definitely not worth the price they put on it
Exactly! Couldn’t agree more.