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What About An iPad Air? Speculations About A Thin, Trim, Featherlight Nexus 7 Killer

This article is more than 10 years old.

The latest speculations about the purported iPad "mini," have finally gotten interesting. For almost the whole timespan of these rumors, we have seen mockup that were merely shrunk down versions of the full-size ipad. Same screen proportion, same chunky bezel, just smaller.

My mind kept returning to the one-handed introductions of both the Kindle Fire by Jeff Bezos and the Nexus 7 by Google's Hugo Barra. You couldn't do that with these "iPad minis" I kept seeing. In my post from a month ago, Here's Why Apple Should Make A 7 Inch 'Large Touch', Instead Of An 8 Inch 'iPad Mini', I argued that Apple should make a "hand" tablet instead of a small "lap" tablet. Something more like a larger iPod Touch than like a smaller iPad.

As I have experienced before with Apple products, hoaxes and misdirections aside, there is a kind of Jungian collective unconscious that many of us find ourselves participating in (perhaps the engineers and designers at Apple feel this way too.) So, this evening, as I was reading John Gruber's latest post on his excellant Daring Fireball blog, all the synapses started firing.

I won't regurgitate Gruber's quantitative process here (please, read it for yourself, if you like micrometers), but he came to a very similar conclusion through much more rigorous means. And then it turns out that Rene Ritchie at iMore had just posted his own, somewhat similar mockup (see above).

What Gruber is proposing is that the side bezels might be even thinner than what Ritchie has shown (and the corner radii a bit rounder, perhaps), so that although this smaller tablet would maintain the screen proportion of the original iPad, the overall form factor would be much slimmer.

But the really original idea that Gruber has come up with is that like yesterday's rumors of an ultra thin iPhone 5 (with "in-cell" screen technology) is that this new, smaller Apple tablet will be super-thin and super-light. By Gruber's estimates, we're talking, "iPod Touch thin: 7.2 mm. That’d be an entire third thinner than the Nexus 7," and for weight, 265 grams vs. the Nexus 7's 340.

So although the Nexus 7 would have a screen with considerably higher pixel density (216 ppi vs 163 ppi), the iPad "mini" would be radically thinner and lighter. And Gruber points out that "Apple, to date, has never introduced a new iOS form factor with a retina display — they add retina displays as upgrades two or three years after devices hit the market." And when the retina display was added to the New iPad it made the overall product thicker and heavier to accomodate the larger battery required to run all those extra pixels, anyway.

Add to this some features the Nexus 7 does not have, Gruber suggests, like cellular networking and a rear-facing camera—and price the entry level WiFi only model competitively—and this really could be a killer. Surprisingly, he relegates one of his best ideas to a footnote that I will pull out here, "Maybe iPad Mini is the wrong name for us to use as a placeholder. It’s not about being smaller — it’s about being thinner and lighter. iPad Air?"

iPad Air, I like it!

UPDATE: Cult of Mac is reporting that a French tech site, nowherelese.fr, claims to have the first leaked component of the "iPad mini," which includes the new mini-connector (see below). Editor of the blog, Steve Hemmerstoffer, ran a photo of the part by Even Kyle Wiens of iFixIt, who supposedly said that it could be genuine. The only independent evidence we have is the photo itself, which shows the new part "next to" a supposed equivalent leaked part from the new iPhone 5. I say "next to," because the iPhone part is clearly composited into the photo, so it seems clear that Hemmerstoffer was most likely not in possession of any actual parts, just the digital "evidence" of them. Given last week's iPhone asymmetrical screw hoax that Cult of Mac was the first to jump on, there is reason to be cautious about the veracity of this report.

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