Steve Jobs didn’t want an iPad mini. He hated the idea. The original iPad was the perfect size and anything smaller just wouldn’t be usable. He made fun of the tiny Android tablets already on the market, literally saying you’d have to shave down your fingers just to hit the tap targets, and that all they could run was blown up phone apps. An unbelievably ironic statement for reasons I’ll get into in a future video.
So, he had Apple focus on making the iPad 2 faster, thinner, and lighter, the iPad 3 Retina, and the iPad 4… fixing the iPad 3.
But then something interesting happened...
Steve Jobs didn’t want an iPad mini. He hated the idea. The original iPad was the perfect size and anything smaller just wouldn’t be usable. He made fun of the tiny Android tablets already on the market, literally saying you’d have to shave down your fingers just to hit the tap targets, and that all they could run was blown up phone apps. An unbelievably ironic statement for reasons I’ll get into in a future video.
So, he had Apple focus on making the iPad 2 faster, thinner, and lighter, the iPad 3 Retina, and the iPad 4… fixing the iPad 3.
But then something interesting happened. In January of 2011, Apple’s head of services, Eddy Cue, read an article on GigaOm. It was by Kevin Toffle, and it was titled Why I Just Dumped the iPad (Hint: Size Matters)
In the article, Kevin laid out why he still very much liked the OG 9.7-inch iPad, but also why he sold it and got a 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab instead. Basically, it was a play on the now famous iPhone-line — the best camera is the one you have with you. For Kevin, the best tablet was the one he could have with him, constantly, in the back pocket of his non-skinny, non-hipster jeans. There were trade-offs, for sure, but, for him, convenience won.
So, Eddy Cue went out, got a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and started using it. He didn’t like Android, obviously, or web browsing for some reason, but he liked email, books, and social media. And he emailed then chief operating officer, Tim Cook, head of iPhone and iPad software, Scott Forstall, and head of marketing, Phil Schiller and told them as much. And he talked to Steve Jobs about it as well. Several times.
Now, the one thing most wanna-be Steves forget about Jobs is that he wasn’t a dictator. He had strong opinions but he also hired smart people and expected them to have strong opinions — and arguments — as well. To change his mind when they knew they were right. Because if they were ever wrong… well, that’d be on them.
It happened with iTunes on Windows and it happened again with the iPad mini. They convinced him there was a market for smaller tablets, but also a threat from them, and if anyone was going to cannibalize the iPad with a smaller tablet, it was going to be Apple, dammit.
Then, as was so often the case, when Steve Jobs changed his mind, he changed it hard. Like Fast chase scene 180 furious spin hard. Going from not wanting and iPad mini to wanting it immediately. The fastest turn around of any new Apple hardware product at the time.
Sadly, Steve Jobs passed away in October of 2011, right after the introduction of the iPhone 4s. But the iPad mini was locked.. FTLs all spun up and go for jump.
Except… except for what could have been an almost insurmountable obstacle for Henri Lamiraux’s software team at the time. They’d done a marathon of sprints to get the original iPhone up and running for 2007, the App Store for 2008, the iPad for 2010, and the idea of having to make another entirely new interface size for 2012… it was a lot.
But, as luck would have it — or, more precisely, the serendipity that comes from smart, sustainable, scalable software decisions over time — they figured out that if they made it slightly bigger — 7.9-inches — they could scale the existing 9.7-inch iPad interface down to iPhone density, and it would still be usable. The bigger iPad-sized UI elements and touch targets just became smaller iPhone-sized UI elements and touch targets. That also meant all of the existing iPad apps, at least the ones that used Apple’s UIKit frameworks or respected the human interface guidelines for the iPad, would just work on the iPad mini. Giving it a huge advantage over tiny Android tablets and their still blown up phone apps.
That effectively flattened the software obstacles and it was go for launch. Well, race for launch, in typical Apple fashion at the time.
They couldn’t do a Retina display, because for chassis and cost reasons it was on second generation Apple A5 silicon, and the iPad 4 was only able to do it well with that many pixels with an A6X, but they’d get there by version 2. They could do a new, sleeker industrial design language though, the one that would only come to the regular iPad the following year with the first Air.
So, on October 23, 2012, at the California Theater in San Jose, Phil Schiller took to the stage and announced it — the iPad mini. Everything great about the original, with a shave and a haircut, all Pym-particled down in size. The most convenient iPad ever.
And, especially in the years before Apple started making big and bigger iPhones, they sold just a ton of smaller iPads.
And now, rumor has it, Apple is revving up their engines for the biggest iPad mini update ever. Maybe not an iPad Pro Pro, but… poetically, and iPad Air mini. I’ve got all the details for you right here, right now, so give it a click and I’ll see you in the next video.