If you read many of the blogs out there, there are lots of people bashing the iPad mini for its lower resolution screen. This is primarily Apple’s own fault for spoiling us with Retina displays on everything, but there is a good reason for it.
Since the mini was (suppose to be) a top secret project with no pre announcements and no developers having time to fine tune their apps for it, Apple made the only possible right decision. Bring the mini into market with a resolution that it already has so there is no need to update any of the iPad apps. This is one of the many faults that the Android system has and I applaud Apple for doing the right thing here. While the technology may exist to fit the iPad’s retina display pixels in the iPad mini, it most certainly would not have come in at the price point that the iPad mini did. Here is another way of looking at this: Given that the iPad mini has the same resolution as the iPad2, its smaller screen size provides a much sharper experience than iPad2.
What Apple did short us on was the processor however. Granted that it could not throw in the A6X since that would have obliterated the iPad market share, but at least the A5X? The only possible reason for this is to also be able to sell the iPad2 which I do not understand now that the iPad mini is out. Long term though, I think the strategy will be that the old iPad and the updated iPad mini will have the same processor (A6X for next year), while the new iPad will have the latest and greatest (A7X?) As for the resolution, I don’t know! It must get a bump, but does that mean that Apple will introduce yet another aspect ratio for developers to code against? We will have to wait and see next year.
As a final point for you to ponder, did Apple just collapse all its product announcements to the September-October time frame? I sure hope they don’t have a newer new new iPad in April.
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