Apple iPad Mini — Haters Gon Hate?

While the news of a fall Apple media event and new prod­uct announce­ment has been writ­ten in wet cement, the talk now is what is to be of an Apple iPad Mini? The atti­tudes seem to vary from indif­fer­ence to hatred of the very thought across the web. I rarely have come across the blog post, new arti­cle or online com­ment so far that exclaims: “An iPad Mini? Hell to the Yeah!” And the cer­tainty of the release of an iPad Mini is still anyone’s guess around here.

That doesn’t mean peo­ple aren’t excited about the idea of a Mini iPad, and def­i­nitely in no way means it will be a dud if released. I believe the Apple fan­base is tem­per­ing their thoughts until more is more widely known, and the skep­tics have no fear.

There are some pretty com­pelling rea­sons to believe an iPad Mini is about to head out the front door. The suc­cess of Google’s Nexus 7, made by Asus was eye-opening. Apple surely doesn’t want Sam­sung and Google pry­ing their way into their house of iPad dom­i­nance via a 7 inch crow­bar. If there’s money to be made in the tablet mar­ket, Apple is going to be there.

Many doubters were con­cerned that the screen size and aspect ratio of a smaller iPad (or larger iPod, which I’ll get to in a minute) would be a prob­lem. That seems to be answered with an iPad that’s 7.85 inches diag­o­nally, allow­ing the iPad Mini to be as tall as the cur­rent iPad’s width, and with a res­o­lu­tion of 1024 by 768 pix­els. Some quick math reveals that this would give the iPad Mini 40% more screen real estate than the Kin­dle Fire and the Nexus 7. That also may solve what Steve Jobs saw as the prob­lem with a smaller iPad, which was finger-usability, since the inter­face is a touch­screen. He looked at two dozen dif­fer­ent sizes before choos­ing the cur­rent iter­a­tion, after all. That size would seem as vast as the Pacific to me after tex­ting and using apps on my iPhone.

How­ever, Steve Jobs has been cor­rect about many things, and even though he is gone, there is def­i­nitely a pres­ence still lin­ger­ing not just around Cuper­tino, but the entire tech world. And his­tor­i­cally new iPads aren’t released until the spring­time. Also, the price point would prob­a­bly be around $50 more than the com­peti­tors, the Kin­dle Fire and Nexus7 tablets. I don’t see that as a big deal for indi­vid­ual con­sumers, who always shell out more for the Apple logo than they prob­a­bly should be, con­sid­er­ing. With the com­pe­ti­tion heat­ing up in the tablet mar­ket, a tri­fecta release of a new iPad, iPhone and iPod would be a heavy blow to, well any and everyone.

Tablet Com­par­i­son Chart Cour­tesy of Tro­janKit­ten via Twitter