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Originally Posted by Chi Cygni

Wasn't Jobs strongly AGAINST a 7" tablet? What are they doing exactly? I was considering buying an iMac but this is the same story, less bang for more bucks and somehow I don't see Apple leading the trends anymore.

Yes, he was.

While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.

Apple has done extensive user testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This one of the key reasons, we think, the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.

Given that all tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pockets, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in their pockets is clearly the wrong trade-off. The 7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with the smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.

These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA – dead on arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small, and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphan product

The reason that we wouldn't make a 7-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a price point. It's because we don't think you can make a great tablet with a 7-inch screen. We think it's too small to express the software that people want to put on these things. And we think – as a software driven company – we think about the software strategies first.

We know that software developers aren't going to deal real well with all these different-size products when they have to redo their software every time a screen size changes, and they're not going to deal real well with products where they can't put enough elements on the screen to build the kind of apps they want to build. So when we make decisions on 7-inch tablets, it's not about cost, it's about the value of the product when you factor in the software. You see what I'm getting at?

And you're sitting around, saying, "Well, how can we make this cheaper? Well, we can put a smaller screen on it, and a slower processor, and less memory," and you assume that the software will somehow just come alive on this product that you're dreaming up. But it won't.

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