Pretty much as we expected. New thinner iPad, new retina iPad mini, new Mac OS X, new updates to the software all round, speed-bumped MacBook Pros. The only real surprises were that OS X 10.9 can be downloaded gratis…and that Apple is still selling not only the previous generation iPad mini, but the iPad 2 as well.
This is a little strange. Sure, keeping the iPad mini as a cheap entry level option is crucial – but it still gets kicked pretty hard by the 2013 Nexus 7 tablet, which brings a retina-class display for $100 less than the non-retina iPad mini. But the iPad 2 – a tablet two and a half years old! – for the same money as the retina MBP? Is having a display just a hair under two inches larger that desirable, especially when the larger screen has half the resolution?
Part of the case to be made, I suppose, is that every inch matters (PAUSE) – that a 10-inch tablet is somehow materially superior to an 8-inch version, even with inferior resolution on the 10-inch display. And that people are willing to pay the difference, to the tune of even hundreds of dollars. I could almost see this working for most Android tablets, given the lack of a real tablet ecosystem and the constant risk that you’ll never get an OS update for an Android device…but then, there’s the Nexus 7 for $229 for a 16 GB (undercutting the retina 16 GB iPad mini by $170) or the 32 GB with LTE for $349 (as opposed to a whopping $529 for the iPad mini-retina).
And then there’s the Kindle Fire series. Amazon has blown off Google altogether, taken the core of the Android Open Source Project and built their own OS around it, with their own media ecosystem and their own app store, and for their trouble they have technically become the leading Android tablet vendor. And they’re offering something completely unique in the tablet world…real live remote tech support.
Basically, Apple’s continual offering of the older version is of a piece with the iPhone 5C or even the iPhone 4S still being on the market. There is a sense than the two-year-old hardware, equipped with iOS 7, is good enough – basically that the iPad will be replaced on more of a laptop timetable than a phone timetable. If hardware from spring 2011 is still salable as new, there’s probably not going to be a whole lot of reason to run out and replace your tablet just because you’re approaching 24 months.
Which is good. I’m in very little hurry to run out and buy a new tablet; the old Dynabook is still a complete laptop replacement for 90% of my purposes. The interesting question would be…would a free first-generation non-retina iPad mini be a satisfactory alternative? Asking for a friend…