In the past few weeks, rumours have been circulating that a 7-inch tablet could be coming out in the near future. These are pretty clearly unfounded. Steve Jobs clearly said in 2010 that Apple would not go down the smaller tablet route.
“One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 per cent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen, unfortunately, this is far from the truth. … 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.”
This is a powerful statement, especially as he also stated that 7-inch tablets would be “dead on arrival” and that 9.7 inches was the “minimum size required to create great apps”.
This is just a quick reminder to not get carried away. It is much more likely that Apple will keep the iPad 2 in production whilst lowering it’s price than announcing a smaller version. It would be going against Steve Jobs’ principles and if that happens, Apple would have gone very wrong indeed.