7 Inch iPad - The Evidence

The recent frenzy surrounding the potential advent of a 7 inch iPad to be released or announced sometime around the new year has abated slightly due to recent claims from Apple CEO Steve Jobs that 7 inch tablets are "terrible". Now this can only mean one of two things.

a) The 7 inch iPad has been confined to the Apple hall of unreleased products never to see the light of day.

b) Its announcement is inevitable.


Lets take a look at the arguments for either side. The best arguments against the release of a 7 inch iPad were brought up by Jobs himself in a recent Q4 Earnings conference call - namely that the screen is actually only 45 % the size of the 10 inch iPad because of diagonal length. To put that into perspective, the 7 inch iPad's screen would be smaller than the bottom half of the 10 inch version. Now Steve argues that this is too small to create "great tablet apps" on and that it sacrifices too much of the iPad's screen size and processing power while offering too little of the iPhone's portability.

And yet Jobs has a history of denying the existence of a rumoured product in the run leading up to its announcement, and has done so with almost every major Apple product launch in the last decade. I wouldn't count on this and this alone however - reading Jobs is never as easy as it seems.

To understand why Jobs & Co. may see the 7 inch iPad as a viable product, one must first examine the way in which it might fill a gap in the market. Many people criticised the iPad when it was announced because they decided that there was no gap in the market that it filled - essentially, they said that the void between smartphones and laptops didn't need filling or was already filled by netbooks. Apple proved them wrong, but can it prove to consumers that there is a gap between the 10 inch iPad and the iPhone? Possibly, but it is a difficult task.

The 7 inch iPad would have to be a device that performed certain tasks better than the iPhone and better than the iPad, or perhaps just one that performed them in a similar way but in a more portable enclosure. Unfortunately, most people do not have a 7 inch pocket, and most people do not feel comfortable browsing the web for extended periods on a 7 inch screen. Apple could change all that, or they could decide against introducing a 7 inch iPad. Either way, something tells me that this will not be the last we hear of this mythical beast.

Back To The Mac

Earlier today, Apple introduced a host of new products under the umbrella title "Back to the Mac". iLife 11, available today, was demoed and described and it looks like an excellent upgrade from iLife 09, especially considering the generous pricing of just $49. Big features include increased social integration in iPhoto, Movie Trailers in iMovie and a feature in GarageBand that provides you with piano and guitar lessons.

A powerful beginning to a characteristically classy performance from Jobs, but one that was easily overshadowed by later developments. The charismatic CEO moved on to announce a piece of software that inevitably had to be coming - FaceTime for the Mac. I have always said that FaceTime, an interesting but admittedly limited feature when it was first announced for the iPhone 4, needed to be expanded. After all, what's the point of only being able to video call the few people you know who actually also have an iPhone 4. Jobs hinted that expansion was coming when he described it as a 'Open Standard' during his WWDC keynote back in the summer, but it has yet to be adopted by Android or Windows. Since then, it has been added to the iPod Touch and, today, the Mac. It seems certain to be headed to the iPad in its next iteration as well. Once FaceTime is on all of these devices, Apple hopes that companies making competing devices will adopt the technology too, meaning that the range of people available for you to place a call with will be greatly expanded.

As you may or may not have guessed by the wonderfully orange-tinted picture of the roaring lion to your left, the next Apple announcement was a 'sneak peek' of a future version if Mac OS X. Big-cat-themed operating system names are commonplace now in the Mac community, and Mac OS 10.7 is no exception, adopting the name "Lion". This lends itself quite well to the theory that we are reaching the end of OS X's lifespan - after all, how do you top Lion? Mountain Lion? I think not.

Steve talked about how iOS was born from Mac OS X and illustrated the circular movement of innovation with his usual elegance, showing how ideas from Mac OS X were useful in developing iOS, and how features from iOS will inevitably be equally useful in future versions of Mac OS X. With this cumbersome mantra imprinted onto your consciousness, try to envision some of the new features making their debut in OS X Lion. Yup, that's right. Multitouch. Nope, not on the screen, apparently "touch wants to be horizontal, not vertical". So we're stuck with trackpads and Magic Mice for now. Yep, they have actually added "Launch Pad" - basically the Mac equivalent of your iOS home screen that shows all your applications. And yes, there is finally, FINALLY, FINALLYa Mac App Store. The tagline? "Fart apps coming to a Mac near you." Like it? I thought so.

On a more serious note, what does this actually mean? Well it means that Apple is trying to make even more money - they want developers to produce apps for your Mac and sell them through a channel that they regulate, they control, and they receive 30% of all sales from. It also means that you will probably have a whole lot more apps on your Mac now that there is actually somewhere to get them from. But more importantly, it means that Apple is making a move towards closing the Mac platform just like they have closed the iOS platform. They want you buying your Applications from them, not anyone else. Is that a good thing? It depends on your philosophy and whether you actually care. What is a good thing, is seamless integration - App Store apps will automatically download in the background, update, and 'just work' as the saying goes.

Lion looks intriguing to say the least, but the exposure we were given to it today was minimal to say the least, and more information will surely be coming sometime soon. To anyone watching the live stream not familiar to Mr. Jobs' mannerisms and speech structure, it would have seemed very logical for him to finish the product announcements there. But, as ever, there was one more thing.



Heavily rumoured in the days and weeks leading up to the presentation, Steve announced two new Macbook Airs based on an entirely new, streamlined 'ultra-portable' design. Last updated in June 2009, the Macbook Air seemed due for a refresh, and boy what a refresh it got. Described by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as what would happen if "a Macbook and an iPad hooked up", the new Macbook Air weighs in at just 2.6lbs for the 13.3 inch version and just 2.3lbs for the 11.6 inch version. That's less than half a gallon of milk. The laptop tapers down from just 0.68 inches thick to an incredible 0.11 inches thick. The low end model costs just $999 - remember that the original Macbook Air cost $1799 when it first came out, and comes equipped with an 11.6 inch screen, 2GB of RAM, a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor. The biggie? Only 64GB of flash storage. Why flash? Well, because it's smaller, more power efficient, twice as fast and far more high technology than a hard drive. Unfortunately, GB for GB, its also far more expensive. After all, a Macbook costing the very same $999 has a 2.4GHz processor and a whopping 250GB hard drive. The Macbook is also twice as heavy. The MacBook Airs boast 5 and 7 hour battery lives, increasing with screen size, and 30 days of standby battery life - another feature influenced by the iPad.

The high end Macbook Air costs $1599 and the extra dough will upgrade your machine to a 13.3 inch screen, 256GB of flash memory, and a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo Processor. For $100 less, you could nab a MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz processor, double the RAM and 320GB of hard drive storage. But the Macbook Pro weighs nearly 3 times as much.

If you want far more power, and far more hard drive space for the same price in your next laptop, the new Macbook Air is most definitely not for you. But if you simply must have the latest gadget, or just desperately need the huge boost in portability and slim form factor, it may be worthwhile to consider it. Can the Macbook Air justify its price tag because of its portability? It depends on your needs.

Windows Phone 7

Derided heavily by none other than yours truly for its frankly ridiculous name, the Windows Phone 7 Series was unveiled in full by Microsoft today. Several things spring to mind upon first glance, none of which have ever before been used to describe a Mircosoft product before. Things like "Damn, that looks cool" and "Is that the new iPhone?". Divided into several "hubs", apps on Windows Phone 7 finally break free from their gridlocked positions on the iPhone and Android platforms and are arranged in a refreshing format. Each hub slides smoothly open to reveal the apps contained within - take the 'People' hub, for instance, described by Microsoft as a "social central, a place to stay connected and in the loop." In other words, you'll find Facebook, address book, and other social apps located there.

From what we can see, Windows Phone 7 is very speedy - partly because of the high standards that need to be met by 3rd party hardware makers in order for their phones to qualify for the software, and partly because of the software itself. After all, Microsoft is a software company.

And yet for all its slick, polished user interface and innovative home screen, Windows Phone 7 in its current form lacks something vital. It lacks a sense of self. Microsoft themselves say that their phone delivers "A phone to save us from our phones" - i.e. a device that lets us get in, grab the information we need, and put it away. In other words, not a smartphone. Yet, of course, this platform is a smartphone platform. Contradiction? Definitely.

All WP7 enabled phones come with XBox Live, a fantastic way to integrate social networking and gaming, and a classic use of the 'halo effect' between the Xbox and WP7 devices. And yet Microsoft seems to be trying to target the enterprise crowd with its Microsoft Office suite. They are trying to entice the social crowd, the young crowd, and the geeks, attacking RIM, Google, Nokia and Apple all at once.

I'd like to remind Microsoft of a wonderful little company called Palm who, much like Microsoft, was blown off the smartphone scene, casually tossed aside by Google, RIM, Nokia and Apple. Palm fought back with the clever, but inevitably doomed Pre, and now they and their excellent WebOS operating system are no more. The Pre was like Windows Phone 7 - it had an excellent user interface, a clever design and some new and innovative features. But like Windows 7, the Pre had no focus. Blackberry has business, Nokia has mass market, Google has the geeks and Apple has the regular consumers and, of course, their cult followers. Have Microsoft spread themselves too thin? Only time will tell.