Rumor has it that Apple is getting closer to revealing a 7-inch iPad (the Wall Street Journal reports that the company component suppliers in Asia are set to begin production in September of a tablet smaller than 8-inches).
However, reports indicate that Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs was critical of such a tablet.
During a conference call in 2010, “Jobs talked about how such tablets offered just a fraction of the screen size as a 10-inch tablet, while not offering a significant boost over the smartphone that most tablet buyers were already carrying,” reports AllThingsD.
Even knowing the inevitability of improved pixel density in the future, Jobs said: “The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point. It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.”
Serious competitors in the low-cost, smaller tablet sector continue to emerge, including last year’s Kindle Fire from Amazon and the pending arrival of the Nexus 7 from Asus and Google.
While competitors continue unveiling smaller, more affordable tablets, “Apple may well feel that it no longer makes sense to leave the segment to competitors,” notes the article.
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