The iPad Mini: It’s all about iTunes

[UPDATED 11:15 a.m. PT] Apple today unveiled something “little”: the long-fabled iPad Mini. Rumors of a 7-inch Apple tablet have been around even before the first iPad was announced, despite the fact that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in no uncertain terms that a 7-inch tablet — what Android makers were shipping prior to the iPad’s debut — simply couldn’t handle the Web or apps very well, so Apple wouldn’t go there.

“The 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps,” Jobs said in October 2010. “Every tablet user is also a smartphone user. No tablet can compete with a smartphone” when it comes to stashing it in a purse or pocket. “Seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad,” he said.

Jobs’ logic made a lot of sense, and when Amazon.com came out with its anemic Kindle Fire last fall, my belief was strengthened that the perpetually rumored iPad Mini was another creation by rumormongering bloggers. But then came the well-liked Nexus 7, an Asus-made, Google-branded 7-inch Android tablet that has a special front end to the standard Android OS — a front end explicitly meant to promote music, video, reading, and game activities, all through the Google Play store.

One more Apple product in your collection Apple apparently saw the same potential and today unveiled an entertainment-oriented iPad with a slightly larger screen than what the competitors offer: 7.9 inches, versus the “regular” iPad’s 9.7 inches. But the pixel resolution is the same for both: 1,024 by 768 pixels, so apps and Web pages remain at the same pixel size on either device. The 7.9-inch size is not the 7-inch size that Jobs pooh-poohed, and the use of the identical pixel count confirms his stated objections that a “tweener” was not what Apple wanted. Using the iPad Mini is more like using an 11.6-inch laptop versus a 13-inch laptop than it is using a Kindle Fire or Asus Nexus 7 versus a full-size Android tablet.

The iPad Mini makes sense in the context of being an iTunes-to-go device, since Apple already makes more money from iTunes than its entire iPod lineup. iPods (and iPhones and iPads) are the razors, and iTunes is the razor-blade dispenser, with perpetual revenue for Apple. The iPad Mini becomes yet one more razor in your collection that gets you to buy more blades.

Of course, the original iPad is already an iTunes-to-go device, in addition to being a laptop replacement for apps and serious Web browsing. As expected, Apple is positioning the iPad Mini as a supplemental device to the full-size iPad and to the iPhone, much as the iPod Touch has become the iPad or iPhone training-wheels product for kids and the pocketable game console for adults who somehow don’t have an iPhone. The quarter-pound iPad Mini fits in a coat or jacket pocket, and it’s suited for playing games, reading books, and watching videos.

As you would expect, it also streams to a TV via AirPlay akin to all other current iOS devices. Once video-capable Lightning cables are finally available, the iPad Mini should also support direct video output to TVs, projectors, and monitors. By contrast, the Amazon.com and Google competitors can’t act as video jukeboxes.

Also no surprise, the iPad Mini runs the full iOS and standard iOS apps, much like the Nexus 7 does for Android. I worry that the iPad Mini’s smaller scereen will scrunch the apps’ and Web pages’ display, so they are difficult to read — obviously, that will be an issue for dense apps and pages but not for simpler apps and websites. And the onscreen keyboard is not full size, so touch typists will have to adjust. However, the more pronounced size differences haven’t hurt either the Nexus 7 or the Samsung Galaxy Note 5-inch “phablet” smartphone/tablet hybrid, which has an even smaller screen.

The likely journey from Steve Jobs’ initial repudiation There’ve been reports that Jobs blessed the iPad Mini before he died. Whether that’s a true revelation or an invented blessing from the grave to justify the turnabout, I don’t know. I do know that as passionate and definitive as Jobs could be on his beliefs, he was fully capable of changing his mind.

For example, when he debuted the initial iPhone, he stated flat out that it would not run native apps because Web apps were the better solution. Six months later, he unveiled the iPhone SDK for creating native iOS apps. Web apps didn’t deliver on their promise, and frankly, they still don’t four years later. Jobs came to the eminently rational decision and changed his mind to support something that actually would work and, of course, make Apple money. Not that he stated that publicly — he just did it, and his past position no longer mattered.

I can very easily see Jobs and/or Apple’s senior leadership coming to the same conclusion after witnessing the warm initial reaction to the first-generation Kindle Fire and realizing its failure was about its poor quality and user experience, not about its fundamental concept — especially given the iPad Mini doesn’t go the “tweener” route that Jobs publicly slammed.

Google, which tends to copy others, probably started the Nexus 7 effort after the Kindle Fire was announced. Although better than the Kindle Fire, it has odd limitations, such as a USB port that doesn’t support the full capabilities of a “real” Android tablet; that’s why you can’t use a USB-to-MHL or USB-to-HDMI cable to get video-out. Google, after all, has no compunction about delivering half-baked products; the vast majority of its Web services are formally in beta, and as experiments, they have no long-term commitments. We’re just beta testers in Google’s world.

That casual approach to product releases is more difficult to carry off in hardware, which can’t be so easily updated, as we saw with Google’s Nexus Q copy of the Apple TV — a product so bad that Google canceled its release days before its promised ship date. But in its “ship before you test” mentality, Google had made it a centerpiece of its Google I/O conference this spring and gave units to thousands of developers and product reviewers, who shared their “feedback” widely. I can attest how bad it was, as I received one to test.

I suspect Apple waited a bit longer to get serious about the iPad Mini, to see the actual market reaction. But I also have no doubt Apple has had iPad Mini prototypes for years; this is a company that tries out all sorts of technologies and keeps them on the back burner until the time is right, even if that is years later. In fact, the iPad and iPhone were two such products.

Will the iPad Mini take off in the market? Probably. iTunes is widely entrenched among PC users, not just Mac and iOS users. It’ll cost $329 to $659 when it becomes available for order on Friday and ships Nov. 2, an easy gift to digital-entertainment-savvy family members. (The highest-priced models have LTE cellular radios.) Meanwhile, the “regular” iPad will continue on its journey to one day replacing a laptop PC and, for the time being, serve as a very useful companion PC.

This article, “The iPad Mini: It’s all about iTunes,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.