I wrote something about this little iPad a while ago, and on reading again that piece I find that it still represent my thoughts today. Yesterday Apple held the official announcement and among other cool things1 there was the iPad mini.
I'm disappointed by two things; first is the lack of the retina display, but I now understand what's at stake here (and I can't believe all the tech commenters do not realize this): you want the retina display, you need more power and more battery to feed it.
The 3rd generation iPad was in fact a little disappointing in terms of performances compared to the non-retina iPad 2; to move all those pixels you need a beefier cpu and not just the slightly tuned A5. Now, with the 4th generation iPad and its A6X cpu, there's (apparently) some serious power to move four million pixels around. If Apple had put a retina display on the iPad mini we probably wouldn't have had enough battery life (assuming the A6X was used) or the display refresh would have been too unbearably slow (keeping the A5X).
Now, it's obvious that one year from now there will be a retina iPad mini; in some secret laboratory around Cupertino (or maybe on Tim Cook's desk) propotypes of this little demon are already running 24/7. But we know that one year is the life cycle of these devices so I want to concentrate on this year's iPad mini.
The second disappointment is the price: I was expecting to pay $250 for the base model, and I was willing to concede Apple the extra $50 compared to Google's Nexus because of the more rounded experience that iPad currently offers. But $329 for the 16Gb model is too close to the price of the larger iPad 2. Will it stop me from buying it? No, because I wanted a smaller, more portable device; something integrated with my iPhone and my computer at home running OS X; something that I already know how to use and does not give me headaches2 . But if I want to give a tablet to my mum for example, so that she can check my newborn daughter's progress, I will not spend $329 and I will seriously look at some Android alternative3.
However, the point is -- what do you need a tablet for? I have already detailed my ideal needs in the aforementioned post, but to recap and recalibrate my ideas: I would need it (omitting the obvious internet/email things) to store and do a first quick review of photographs, when I'm away from home for some extended period of time; to work on my writing (I use very often Byword on my iPhone and I'm sure that doing so on a larger display would help immensely); for sketching and reading and annotating PDFs (I have always been unable to read PDFs on a computer screen, but doing that on an iPad is slightly more convenient)4.
Yes I know, all boring and conventional stuff, something that I am pretty certain that an iPad mini will allow me to do easily.
But what about something new, something that could really alter a photographer's workflow, and maybe improve it? Back in 2010 I had an idea about using a tablet to help a photographer's work. Later on, I found that my ideas/dreams were realized by some clever folks, but very little is made of these apps when discussing iPads/tablets and photography, and the usual story is about using the tablet as a portfolio viewer.
So I ask myself, is there something else I could use an iPad for? how do skilled photographers (not tech-nerds, because I don't want to end up reading the equivalent of using iPhones for shopping lists) use their tablets for?
For example, there's this Google "Guy"5 that likes his Nexus 7. Another article called "The iPad Workflow" was recently published on Dpreview Connect; there are some good points but nothing too outrageously inventive.
But apart from that, is there some more interesting stories about for example a real editing workflow example for photographers? I guess I will end up using the iPad to watch some movies after all, and photography will be still made with a camera and a normal computer.
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I don't care too much about the iMacs (even though they look amazing) -- I prefer to have my display separated from my machine. The Macmini is still my favourite Apple desktop computer; I have been a happy Macmini user for a long time, the first one was the original powered by the PowerPC G4, then a Core 2 Duo 2.66ghz which I still have it running as my media player running XBMC. The problem with the current Macmini is that the quad-core version is a bit too expensive. What I care about is the Macbook pro 13" with retina display, really appealing for my current heavy Aperture use. For the moment however I'll hold on to my old Macbook Air 11" and my Hackintosh which is so more powerful with its 3.33Ghz quad-core i5, SSDs; it's becoming however more likely that in the future I'll go back to a single computer, maybe the 15" Pro connected to the same Eizo 24" monitor for some comfortable photo editing sessions at home, and possibly the iPad mini as my to-go machine. ↩
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The other day I played with my friend's Galaxy Note 2; a 5" hybrid smarthone-tablet , great display and fast and powerful and full of interesting details and though-out applications; it even has a stylus, which looks dorky but for some precision work beats the fat fingers hands down. The problem is that such a device tries too hard to do more things than an iPad, and in doing so it becomes too convoluted; and if a user like me, who scores high on the nerd-scale, finds it "complicated" , I can only imagine the frustration that a normal user (mum; grandpa; your older brother who does not really click with technology; etc.) could experience. ↩
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The only viable options at the time of writing are one of the Samsung Galaxy-whatever and Google's Nexus 7; right now I am waiting for the delivery of a chinese knock-off which I bought for a ridicolously low price -- if the experiment goes well, I will write something more about it. ↩
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So the 32gb wifi version is the one that I will probably go for. And next year I will surely sweat over the "iPad mini with Retina display". ↩
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Unwanted pun; I just realized that the guy's name is Romain Guy. ↩