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Originally Posted by PatNY
Agree here. I don't think there would be an iPad Mini if Jobs were still alive and heading Apple. He crucified the 7" form factor, and coming out with a 7.9" one is not enough of a difference to plausibly save face. His tremendous ego would have stood in the way of their putting out a smaller iPad.
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You have a fundamental misunderstanding of Jobs. Jobs changed his mind *all the time*. Even after making public comments. The video iPod is the most analogous situation to this one (a year after saying video didn't make sense on an iPod, Apple came out with the video iPod), but there are many others (no third party apps on the iPhone; upside down apple logo, etc.) There's no face-saving necessary; he just came out with the new product if he thought it made sense at the time. I'm sure he would point out that this wasn't a 7" screen and was 35% larger, of course.
As for crucifying, he made a disparaging comment during a phone call a couple of years ago. I'm sure he wouldn't feel bound by that now.
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One also has to question whether Apple would have put out their half-baked maps app had Jobs been alive. He was such a perfectionist that he likely would have delayed it and stuck with Google Maps for one more cycle.
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Antennagate? Mobile Me? Cut and paste in iOS?
There were a lot of imperfections under Jobs.
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The question of Jobs' death on Apple is an interesting one. While he was the driving force behind their resurgence after the company hit the doldrums, it seemed he was also a driving force for the current costly patent wars, which may end up to be ultimately destructive to Apple, diverting money and time from R&D efforts. Maybe they should have spent less money on their court litigation and more on the development team that worked on the maps app!
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Or maybe they can find some use for the extra billion from Samsung. Its not like paying lawyers is particularly expensive given their revenue - the one thing apple is not short of is money.
People who are critical of Apple tend to not know much about Jobs and thus completely mischaracterize him as someone who never changed his mind. There are two psychological motives for this, AFAICT. The first is that it helps paint Apple users as sheep, mindlessly following a "Messiah." And the second is that it allows them to predict Apple's demise, on the basis that what Apple is now doing is somehow inconsistent with what Jobs once said about something.
But of course this is ridiculous because, as mentioned above, he changed his mind all the time. Probably one of his strengths as a manager was that he surrounded himself with people strong enough to change his mind when necessary. (The most interesting parts of the isaacson bio are where people need to find a way to show him he's wrong about something (Corning CEO Wendell Weeks: "Shut up, Steve, and let me tell you about science).)
On the specific iPad mini issue, it's pretty hard to argue on the merits that it's going to hurt Apple.