The seven-inch itch

APPLE'S late founder, Steve Jobs, was no fan of small tablets. He claimed their screens fell in a no-man's land, somewhere between a smartphone and an iPad. So Apple looked on as competitors found success with seven- and eight-inch devices. On October 23rd, however, it threw its hat in the ring at last. At an event in San Jose, California, the firm unveiled the iPad Mini, a 7.9-inch model, two-thirds the size of the 9.7-inch iPad.

Priced at $330, the cheapest Mini is more expensive than its competitors, like Google's Nexus 7 ($250 with the same storage), Amazon's seven-inch Kindle ($160) and Barnes and Noble's Nook ($200). But Phil Schiller (pictured), Apple’s vice-president for marketing, boasted that the Mini was lighter, thinner and more sturdy than the Nexus 7, with a bigger screen to boot.

Apple has another advantage. While offering a range of products, it has avoided its competitors' strategy of trying a variety of screen ratios, something hardware firms making tablets based on Google's Android operating system have been doing. As a consequence, programmers that create apps for Android must contend with dozens of different resolutions, which can make it difficult to write software that looks good across different screens.

By contrast, Apple's Mini has the same dimensions, 1024 by 768 pixels, as the original iPad. Tablet apps created for all iPads will work and be just as appealing on the Mini.

Crucially, the Mini brings an iPad within reach of customers for whom the $399-$499 starting price of its larger brethren proved too much. The smaller tablet scratches an itch Apple claimed it didn't have, but turned out to do, after all.

From Economists by G.F