There is no obvious reason this product isn't going to sell in huge quantities.
Less conceptually fragile, less expensive, more portable, same software stack, same media stack, same OS, same UX, same premium experience, same monstrous manufacturing and distribution reach, same monstrous advertising and product awareness engine.
Every single one of the children you see in restaurants working an iPad so mommy and daddy can eat in peace will have one of these by January.
Schools will buy in by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of actual utility or how successful digital textbooks eventually become.
This is the new travel iPad. This is the status gift for the developing world. This is the throwaway iPad if you're rich or the first one you look at if you're less so.
It's priced to make Apple the margins they want while still inviting comparisons with less expensive and similarly sized tablets. It's going to suck the oxygen out of the $300-$500 price range for anything with a screen.
And it's cheap enough to substantially distinguish itself from the main iPad line, which is selling millions a week. That's all it had to do, pricing-wise.
I don't want or need this, and I don't think it was particularly necessary for the health of the iPad line, but they dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts when designing this product.
I think it will be a huge success for Apple. I know a lot of folks want to believe Apple's success has just been some amazing fluke thus must end soon but there's really no indication out there the market has changed much since the original iPod. Apple keeps running the same play over and over again because it works. It's very clever. Apple positions their products to be affordable luxuries. This is mostly expressed through the device's design but also because Apple protects their brands very carefully. There is no cheap iPad -- there's a thinner and lighter iPad that happens to cost less.
Psychologically this is interesting because Apple is pulling at a lot of strings here. They want consumers to feel good about buying the product. Not resentful it's not the thing they really wanted but couldn't afford. Part of it is almost Pavlovian. The customer pays more but in the process is rewarded in different ways. For having the taste to pick the perceived superior brand for example. It's an item coveted by others, again if only because it's perceived to be superior, and it's an item that broadcasts it's premium price tag like a badge of honor with a striking design. The customer enjoys the experience of everyone swooning over their new purchase. They like the idea thousands of people are waiting in line to get this thing they are holding in their hands right now. This is even more important in the context of giving Apple products as gifts. Buying someone the cheap but acceptable option sends one message. Buying someone the expensive and also acceptable option sends a different message.
Basically Apple cracked the code of getting people to pay more and be pretty happy about it.
This is just a quick meta-comment, because I feel a simple upvote isn't enough: insightful comments like yours and its parent are the lifeblood of Hacker News. Please keep them coming.
"It's going to suck the oxygen out of the $300-$500 price range for anything with a screen."
Which is very clever, they know their competitors are going for price, but now they've forced them to commit to seriously low margins. Always helpful to keep your competition struggling to make meaningful profit.
I think the idea behind pricing at ~$300 instead of $200 (as with N7 or Kindle Fire) was to separate themselves from what they want people to believe are cheap knock-offs.
I completely agree with this. This was also evident with the iPhone 5 release. When the competition (think Samsung Galaxy S3) was selling for a few dollars more, Apple didn't hesitate to bump their price to match. And, obviously, this has always been the case with every other product they've sold in the last 20 years.
Yeah, I think they made a mistake here. Of course I have no idea what their margins are, but $299 looks a whole lot better than $329. Would $30 really make or break them?
Have to also keep in mind the price of the mini vs full sized ipad... it's not just dropping $20 (well, $30) per mini sold... there's a lot of nuance in the pricing and consumer perception of the cost vs value of mini vs other products (including full sized iPad...)
My sense is, and it's just my sense, is that they priced it more with cannabalization or the larger iPad's in mind and less with the competition in mind. If they had come in around $249 to $279 they could have still sent all the right signals about this being superior to the competition. However, at that price point they would have really impacted their $499 iPad. I believe Apple left a big hole for competition to thrive in because of the fear of impacting the larger iPad. Two reasons: Apple admits that the main usage for a tablet is surfing the web and checking email. A Nexus 7 does that just fine. Secondly, Nexus 7 will improve significantly from the 1st gen it is - Apple's given them plenty of breathing room to bump the specs and sell a higher end device at $299 and even $329 price. Apple had a difficult job but I sense they acted like the large incumbent they are and worried about their own shorter term margins and less on snuffing out the competition.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I'd never use this product but I'm sure it will do great.
I've been really critical of Apple lately, but I can't find any reason to get upset over this announcement. I find it funny how people are railing against this announcement just because its not useful to them. There are a million different needs and uses out there for different people.
You triggered something: I have been wondering why Apple does not have iPads support multiple user accounts that are easy to switch between? With iCloud, it would seem reasonable for a family to have a min, a standard iPad, and perhaps a future "iPad whopper" (with perhaps a 14 inch screen). They could be left laying around the house and anyone could just pick up the appropriate device as-needed.
I can answer my own question: Apple doesn't want people to share these devices: fewer sales.
Not saying they won't look at it in the future but We have a family iPad and its no problem. My wife can see my email but she's my wife so I honestly don't care. Our neighbours have two between six of them and similarly have no issues.
People with a tech background worry about this more than most people but they also tend to be the sort of people who have their own devices. For normal families the current situation is a relatively minor problem - considerably less of an issue than both kids wanting it at once I suggest.
I'm not mainly 'worried' about my girlfriend, but my daughter. Having a locked down account where internet is permanently off , only certain programs are shown, and where she can't delete icons would be great.
General > Restrictions will give you most of what you want (deleting icons, stopping changes to contacts and so on). Set up a profile in there which you enable when you hand the phone over.
I also tend to enable Airplane mode by default when I hand my phone or iPad to my daughters.
I totally agree with you, and I don't see it changing.
Apple has trapped itself into a corner with the Apple ID. Apple puts on regular seminars for local school districts every 6 months or so in my area about how to integrate iPads for K12, and it is just brutal. At least 60% of the answers from the Apple rep is usually "you can't use it like that".
The hardships all come from the way that the Apple ID works. Apple wants the iPad to be a "personal device" for one person, but obviously in a school setting it doesn't work that way. The workarounds they have for school districts are laughable to the point that the Apple rep(s) always admit it to us when talking about manageability, security and tracking.
I love my iPad, but its just not enterprise/public school/multiuser friendly yet.
Agree so much. Apple ID hell is a Real World Problem and I suspect making real changes to how it all works would take some herculean efforts - daunting even for Apple.
"I can answer my own question: Apple doesn't want people to share these devices: fewer sales."
Bingo.
Apple wants people to share iPads only to the extent that doing so gives other people a trial of the product, and ideally, a burning desire for it. Apple doesn't want the kids sharing Mom's iPad; Apple wants kids bugging Mom half to death for their own iPads.
Please. While I'm sure people just talk about their own opinions in many cases, it also happens all the time that people criticize the specs or other attributes of a new product precisely because they think it won't appeal to the masses.
With respect to digital textbooks, as someone who had to haul many American sized (read: Oversized) textbooks from class to class, from school to home, every day for 6 years during Junior High and High School, carrying around 1 iPad would have relieved my spine of great gravitational burden.
For this reason alone, I truly hope that digital textbooks become viable.
But do you think school should be relying on iOS/Android/Kindle?
Should they use something new? I don't want governments to pay (even more?) bazillions to Apple or Samsung, but making their own will also come expensive.
Apple hypes their platform specific tools, but there's no reason that at least traditional textbook content can't be provided in an easily cross platform way. Even the more complex content will likely become standardized to some extent in the near future (presenting it in web views is probably viable for a lot of it, especially once there's better support for <audio> tags).
Districts probably aren't going to care, as they are looking for a cheaper way to stay current. I recognize the prices are not as good as they should be, but realize the logistics are removed from the situation. The monster of having to manage all those books goes away with a keypress, but lands them squarely on a treadmill with the publishers controlling the dial.
Open school books? Maybe teachers will collaborate and make their own material? There's a lot of room in there...
I disagree mostly with the parent and see in iPad mini few minuses for Apple; (1) 7.9" is slightly big to fit in pockets, (2) the non-retina display, and low resolution is a step backwards, (3) The lower net profit per person, will drag down Apple margins.(Now having the Apple logo seeable in a cafe will cost you lower) (4) The loss of credibility in previous marketing claims of perfect size for fingers similar to the move from 3.5" to 4.0" (5) will canibalize the bigger iPad.
I think the 1024x768 screen resolution is probably a smart move: same as my old iPad 2, but smaller. Not retina display quality, but not adding a retina display allowed the iPad mini to be less than half the weight.
That said, my Samsung Galaxy S III has 1280x720 resolution which makes it really nice for watching Netflix, TED videos, etc. And the Galaxy phone is very light weight.
I have decided to not buy anymore Apple gear, but if not for that, if I was in the market for an iPad, I would rather have this smaller one that is less than half the weight.
I see the mini competing more with 'super phones' like the Samsung Galaxy S III.
I've heard this a lot, but I honestly can't think of anything I use on my iPad that isn't built-in. I say more or less the same thing about my Nexus 7, aside from stuff like game emulators which are verboten on iOS (and, truthfully, I don't use them that often).
The main reason I bought an iPad was... the musical apps (and the fact you can read ebooks with the Kindle app).
The iPad is a revolution in the musical scene.
Musical apps is something you won't get in the Android Eco-system basically because the OS itself sucks at it(although 4.1 seems to have improved a bit on that side).
With this in mind(musical apps), I will always favor the iPad (mini) over an Android tablet.
That's interesting. I found them largely useless, Lemur and TouchOSC aside (Android has TouchOSC support, though I do keep the iPad around if I want to use Lemur--haven't for a while though), but it's cool to see that they're useful for somebody.
I like Auria, Amplitube,BeatMaker2,iMS20,iSequence,DM1,Animoog,Soundprism and the likes very much.
with audiobus on its way, it is going to get even more interesting.
Been using them for lives & recording demos (iPad+MiC+Jam).
the iPad never crashes(not like Android that freezes a lot).
Obviously you do no get a full pc stack and the quality is still not there so I resort to the Mac for more functionality/sound treatment but you can enjoy quite very much if you can't afford the thousands that cost Native Instruments softs or real hardware synths/drum machines.
Strongly disagree, iOS is horribly limiting. I like having OSMAnd navigation with frequently updated offline vector maps and I like having access to hardware capabilities for stuff like this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1914699
Also (IMO) latest versions of Android wipe the floor with iOS when it comes to user experience and options. And N7 is quad core with Tegra, superb build quality and larger resolution for less money.
> not adding a retina display allowed the iPad mini to be less than half the weight
do the pixels weigh more? Seriously, would faster graphics weigh more? Or are you saying juicing the graphics would eat more battery, and therefore, it would weight more?
Yes. The iPad 3 was significantly thicker and heavier than the iPad 2. It takes a larger battery to drive 4 times the pixels and maintain a 10 hour battery life.
The retina display is significantly less translucent, requiring a greater backlight for the same brightness on the front of the panel than a non-retina.
The backlight being the lion's share of the battery consumption, this requires a significantly larger battery.
Less conceptually fragile, less expensive, more portable, same software stack, same media stack, same OS, same UX, same premium experience, same monstrous manufacturing and distribution reach, same monstrous advertising and product awareness engine.
Every single one of the children you see in restaurants working an iPad so mommy and daddy can eat in peace will have one of these by January.
Schools will buy in by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of actual utility or how successful digital textbooks eventually become.
This is the new travel iPad. This is the status gift for the developing world. This is the throwaway iPad if you're rich or the first one you look at if you're less so.
It's priced to make Apple the margins they want while still inviting comparisons with less expensive and similarly sized tablets. It's going to suck the oxygen out of the $300-$500 price range for anything with a screen.
And it's cheap enough to substantially distinguish itself from the main iPad line, which is selling millions a week. That's all it had to do, pricing-wise.
I don't want or need this, and I don't think it was particularly necessary for the health of the iPad line, but they dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts when designing this product.