It’s all true

Every single rumor appears to have paid out today. 13-inch retina MacBook Pro. New Mac mini, new iMac, updated iPad, and – of course – the long-awaited iPad mini, complete with 7.85-inch screen to use the same display resolution as original iPad apps.

Now…do I wish I’d held out and waited? You can’t do that with technology. You have to get what you can and get the full use out of it. And I have. From a pure jacket-ology standpoint, would I like an iPad that fit in all my coats? Sure. But that’s what the iPhone 5 is going to be for…in a month. Probably. Hopefully. 🙂

More to the point, it may be time for me to take the plunge and replace the Mac mini at home, which is three years old and showing its age. It wouldn’t suck if we could get the entirety of everything on a hard drive without dragging an external drive to handle the video storage.

But back to the iPad mini – why? And why now?

I think it goes to the Kindle Fire. Amazon gave the world its first 7-inch tablet that didn’t suck. They did so by following the Apple path: pare it down, include only the stuff you really need, and optimize it for doing the stuff that users want from it. Then, Google handed out the Nexus 7 and proved you could do a full-function tablet in that form factor that didn’t suck. So rather than leave a gap in the market between the iPhone and the full-size iPad, one that its primary rivals could exploit, Apple slid this thing in – the screen less than two inches smaller, but cut down in form factor to get in that 7″ tablet spot.

Himself said you needed to file your fingers to a point to use a 7-inch tablet. But he’s not in charge any more. Things change. And Apple’s starting at $329 for a wi-fi 16 GB model, almost $100 more than the Nexus 7…and counting on the Apple ecosystem and reputation to be worth an eighty dollar premium. Because that’s where they’re playing: affordable premium, instead of lowest cost.

Can they keep it up? Who knows? It hasn’t stopped yet.

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