Apple's iPad Mini: What They're Saying

By PCMag Staff

October 23, 2012

Apple's pint-sized tablet went from fable to fait accompli with the in San Jose, Calif. on Tuesday morning. The new device will start at $329 for a 16GB, Wi-Fi-only version, with pre-orders starting Oct. 26 and the first iPad Minis due to arrive in buyers' hands by Nov. 2.

We've had a look at the smaller version of Apple's best-selling iPad, which will join popular 7-inchers already on the scene like Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7, just in time for the holidays. PCMag will have hands-on reports and full-scale reviews for you in the coming days, and we're sure that the next few weeks will bring any number of iPad mini low downs, teardowns, breakdowns, and put-downs from the usual suspects, as well.

Reviews and analysis are already streaming in, as it happens. IHS iSuppli's Rhoda Alexander, for example, reckoned that the iPad mini will "turbo-charge the market for 7-inch tablets" and of such devices in the remaining months of this year and through 2013. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster figured "[t]he whole competitive landscape of tablets just got turned upside down."

But the smaller iPad will enter a tablet market that's a lot more crowded than the one pioneered by its bigger brother back on April 3, 2010, when Apple released the very first iPad. There are the aforementioned Android-based offerings from Amazon, Google, and others, priced as much as $180 less than the entry-level iPad mini. When Apple's 7-incher arrives alongside a new full-sized, , new tablets and hybrid tablet-laptops running Microsoft's next-gen, touch-optimized Windows 8 operating system will also be looking to secure a place on holiday shopping lists.

So what's so great (or not-so-great) about the iPad mini? Here are some early returns from more select analysts and tech sites weighing in on Apple's new toy.

First up, some more positive iPad mini vibes from Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, who gushed: "Apple's execution dazzles. You pick up this device—which weighs only 0.68 pounds—and it feels feather-light, perfectly weight-balanced—and decidedly not made out of plastic, as its competitor devices are."

Keep the exuberance of Epps and Munster stored away in your memory, because further digging turns up decidedly less hospitable first impressions of the new iDevice. Like this "key takeaway" from Apple's iPad mini unveiling, courtesy of Trip Chowdhry, managing director of Equity Research: "Innovation at Apple is over ... [it's] just incremental improvements, nothing ground breaking, the best is over for Apple. The iPad mini is playing catch up to Google Android and probably will have a mediocre customer adoption."

Yikes! But Chowdhry wasn't the only skeptic out there. ZDNet blogger Ken Hess, figuring Apple must have "a very large pair of brass iStones" to have "diluted the market to the point of ridiculous" with the release of two new iPads barely seven months after launching its third-gen tablet, offered up this bit of venom: "I think even the most devoted, mouth-foaming Mactard gets the picture—the enhanced Retina, improved camera, faster processor, still very expensive picture, that is. Two iPad releases in the same year. How stupid do you think people are?"

For a friendlier take, you didn't have to look very far, particularly if you've got a few of the reliably pro-Apple sites and bloggers dialed up in your bookmarks. Case in point, here's Slate's Farhad Manjoo: "Thinness is ... the iPad mini's most obvious virtue. Picking it up, I was impressed by how slight it felt compared to the full-sized iPad."

In a bit of a shock, Manjoo's fascination was short-lived. Saying that, "[o]verall, though, the mini's design didn't stand out to me," the Slate reviewer wondered if the new tablet's starting price, "just $70 less than the cheapest full-sized iPad" might be too steep for the screen real estate you're giving up. We'll check back with Manjoo in a few days—after all, he's been known to reverse course on a hastily scribbled denunciation of an Apple product.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, predicted that Apple "will sell a lot of iPad minis, but the competition will be a lot tougher than it is for iPhones and full-sized iPads."

How so?

"Apple takes advantage of deep telco subsidies which make the iPhone look less expensive than it is. Full-sized iPads compete with Android tablets that have an ecosystem with hundreds of apps, not hundreds of thousands of apps like iOS. The iPad mini will compete with 7-inch Android tablets that have hundreds of thousands of apps," the analyst said.

And count Moorhead among those a bit puzzled by the entry-level price for the iPad mini—before Apple announced the $329 price tag, he figured the tablet as a $299 product, which would still allow the company to live in the 30 to 40 percent gross profit range.

"With the Amazon Kindle Fire at $149, a $299 to $349 price would be pushing the pricing power farther than I have seen in a long time. I do expect an iPad mini to have a much better experience than a $149 Kindle Fire, but with many consumers just glad to be able to have an affordable tablet, many will opt for the Fire," Moorhead said earlier this week.

"Apple will sell truckloads of iPad minis this holiday season, but not nearly as many as they could have if the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire didn't exist."

So did anybody else serve up one of those old-fashioned, star-struck fanboy reviews of the mini that we've become so accustomed to when Apple announces something shiny and new? For that, we had to break the glass and pull the fire alarm—but lo and behold, even Daring Fireball's John Gruber had a pretty blasé first take on the iPad mini. Is nothing sacred? Or has Apple finally joined the Microsofts and the HPs of the world and settled into its boring middle period, after all these years of setting the pace for consumer technology?

Who are we kidding? They'll sell a jillion of these things.

For more, check out and the slide show below.