I tend to believe that the main thinking affecting investors with a negative sentiment in Apple’s long term future is one of historical perspective. Apple with their closed and vertical model lost to the more open model of Microsoft long ago. So the conventional thinking would be that both Google or Microsoft with their more open platform approach will again rise to dominance if history does repeat itself. There are, however, several things I believe are wrong with the thinking that history will repeat itself.

(via TechPinions)

I’ve been trying to figure out for years why so many analysts get this wrong. If you can’t see the obvious diffences between the tech industry of the 1990s and today, you have no business predicting the future of any tech company, let alone Apple.

Also, if you believe that anything Microsoft or Google does is ‘open,’ you’re completely eating their marketing crap and not thinking critically at all.

Which would be fine, except that you’re playing with other people’s money.

“That’s the theory, but does it work for practical applications? Below are a few screengrabs from my iPad that have been shrunk down and then padded back out. If you load this page on a 10′ iPad, you’ll find each of the below images should come out exactly 7.85′ across the diagonal — emulating how they would look on an ‘iPad mini’. This will let you get a feel for how small those buttons get.

(Note that the resizing process has made things look a bit fuzzy. This wouldn’t happen on a real iPad mini, so please just overlook that.)”

(Via. http://seveneightyfive.fscked.com/)

So I noted a few days ago that this rumored 7-inch iPad would be more cramped than people imagine, and that the only true way to test this theory out was to print out some interfaces from the iPad at that size, stick them onto a hard surface, and tap around to get a feel for just how tight the screen elements would be.

Richard Gaywood hasn’t done quite that, but he has done the next best thing: he’s made some screenshots of common iPad apps and resized them to the correct size so that they would be at “scale” on a full-sized iPad. In other words, click on the linked article above from your current iPad and check out the linked images. Not a perfect test, but a pretty good approximation of the size of elements in relation to one another, at least.

The shortcomings of this test? Well, you’re still holding a full-sized iPad, so your hands are further away from the targets than they would be when holding the device. And the weight is obviously heavier than a smaller iPad would be. And the resolution makes things look fuzzy, so you have to take the fuzzy factor out of your bias. And finally, he cherry-picked the apps a bit and in my opinion picked rather sparse user interfaces. Even the shot from Garageband, which is a pretty feature-rich app, is a shot of the guitar interface, which is more spaced out than a lot of other views in Garageband.

Having said all that, I have to say that the first thing I thought when looking at these images was “is this really the correct size?” 7.85″ is a heck of a lot different from 7 inches. This is not anywhere near as small as the Kindle Fire or the Galaxy Nexus. That .85 inches is a big difference. It just doesn’t feel that much smaller at all than the full-sized iPad.

7 inches sounds like 3 inches smaller than the 10-inch iPad. But when you look at the actual numbers of 7.85 and 9.7 (the current iPad’s size), the difference is a lot closer to 2 inches than 3. In fact, it’s less than 2 inches difference.

And that leads me to two new conclusions:

First, I was wrong; regular iPad apps on this thing will probably be okay for the most part. I think there will be the odd app here and there that will have to rework the UI a bit, but most apps really will work just fine smaller, as far as I can tell.

Second, why not just make all iPads this size? Seriously, if they were able to make a Retina version of this (which they should, since it’s the same density as the iPhone Retina screen), they should just make all iPads 7.85 inches moving forward. Unless the battery life tradeoff is too much to bear, which is entirely possible. At the very least, though, the 7.85-inch should render the last-gen but still shipping iPad 2 obsolete. There’s no reason for a full-sized non-retina iPad to exist once this thing enters the picture. Unless there are more limitations in the smaller device other than form factor that I’m not seeing, such as wanting to drive the cost down with slower processors, cheaper components, etc.

And that remains the bigger question. I don’t know how something this big will be so much cheaper to make. Seems like almost the same amounts of aluminum and glass involved, and the internals can’t be that much cheaper if they go slower or add a little less RAM. So the price of this is probably going to be closer to $299 than $199. That’s enough to tempt a lot of users away from a Nexus, maybe, but it’s also plenty to kill off the more profitable iPad2. Why would Apple want to do that, unless they were truly scared of that Nexus actually building traction? I just don’t see that happening.

So there are still some missing puzzle pieces here. But we’re getting closer.

Is a 7-inch iPad right for Apple? – Chicago Sun-Times: “Nonetheless, Apple has $100 billion under its mattress. They don’t need to rush into anything. Also, as quaint as this may sound, a desire to only make truly great products is part of Apple’s cultural makeup.

The challenge Apple faces with such a device is that a 7-inch iPad or iPod Touch would need to compete against the value and the utility and the presence and the legacy of the 10-inch iPad. That’s way more intimidating than trying to sweep away any dirt-cheap Android tablet.”

(Via. Chicago Sun-Times)

Andy Ihnatko is spot on here. A 7-inch iPad is going to easily crush the Android and Kindle tablets of the world. But making an inexpensive 7-inch tablet that can live up to the expectations of its bigger brother 10-inch iPad is another story. Unlike the Nexus and Kindle Fires of the world, Apple’s smaller tablet won’t be graded on a curve. So if and when Apple pulls the trigger on this product, it needs to be a great experience. And I still don’t think that simply shrinking down iPad apps is going to provide that experience.

Like the iPod nano and Shuffle, the 7-inch iPad needs a Raison D’être. It needs a story beyond “we want to flood every sector of the market to make more money.” Otherwise, it’ll either disappoint people who want what the big iPad does, or it’ll do nothing but steal big iPad sales from people who just want to read and watch movies.

It doesn’t serve Apple well to cater to the market that doesn’t yet see the full value of a tablet that can truly create. People who don’t yet get that the iPad is on its way to replacing the PC altogether are only slowing down Apple’s quest to take over the consumer computing space. A small, cheap tablet that you only use to read and watch movies on planes perpetuates the world of traditional PCs, a world where the tablet is for play and your PC is for “serious” work. That’s a world Microsoft continues to dominate.

The faster Apple can make PCs into trucks, in other words, the better. So even a 7-inch tablet needs to be seen as a productive, creation-driven device. And at the same time, it needs to be different from its big brother beyond size and price. Otherwise, it’s just another cheap knockoff.

Why iPad Apps Should Be OK Usability-Wise on a 7.8-Inch iPad:

A 44 point target on a 7.85″ iPad would be the same size as a 44 point target on the iPhone (0.27″). Millions of people use the iPhone every day, and have little trouble tapping a 0.27″ target. As Apple has pointed out, their fingers do not change size when they move to their iPad.

(Via Daring Fireball)

This is all well and good from a theoretical standpoint, but what someone needs to do is print out a bunch of iPad screenshots at this new 7.85″ diagonal size and tap around. I have a feeling it would feel more cramped than either Gruber or Bernstein are imagining.

Sure, it may work for simple list apps, like mail, and todo list managers, but a lot of apps go through great pains to make explicit use of the iPad’s real estate. The more power-intense content creation apps, in particular, the ones with lots of custom gestures, are going to suffer.

When we design iPad apps, we aren’t just doing math. We test the layout on the screen, tapping buttons, sliding our fingers around, etc. Sure, we follow the 44-pixel guideline in general, but often we add more space, move buttons around, etc. as a reaction to how it physically feels on the device. If you just go and shrink everything down, it will have an impact on the experience.

So even if iPad apps will technically “just work” on this new device, I wouldn’t be so sure that the experience would be great in many cases. So a lot of designers would want to target this physical screen size and create our own versions for it, anyway. Which is fine, as long as Apple gives us a way to do that.

Maybe iPad apps will “work” out of the box, just like iPhone apps work on the current iPad. But the better apps will be the ones to customize specifically for the smaller screen? Who knows?

Or maybe this smaller device has more reason to exist than to simply be a cheap gateway drug into the tablet world. I’m not sold on the idea that Apple will put this device out there simply to eat Google’s and Amazon’s lunch. Maybe there’s a lot more to it than that, and the 7-inch form factor will be targeted at a very different purpose.

Podcasts Version: 1.0 Review | iPhone and iPad Entertainment App | Macworld:

Apple’s new Podcasts app is a welcome step to bringing attention to audio and video podcasts that were previously buried in the Music app. But while it has some good things going for it, it’s a step that’s not yet fully realized.

(Via www.macworld.com)

This is Marco Arment’s Starbuck’s theory playing out. Rather than threatening current podcasts applications on the App Store, Apple’s Podcasts app is more likely to raise awareness of Podcasting in general, and therefore ultimately increase the audience for apps like Instacast, iCatcher, or my personal app of choice – Downcast.

For many, many people, Apple’s app will do just fine. But it won’t be long until a good number of new podcast fans gets frustrated with Apple’s limitations and decides to go for a more “pro” solution.

I’d love to see sales numbers for apps like Downcast over the next six to twelve months.

One of the biggest challenges for marketing an app is raising awareness of the “problem” your app solves. You need to convince people that they have the problem in the first place. In a sense, Apple is doing that marketing for these developers.