Edible Apple

During Scott Forstall’s appearance on the witness stand last Friday, an interesting piece of information regarding Apple’s internal discussion of a 7-inch iPad was brought to light.

Forstall at one point was shown an internal email from Eddy cue sent to a slew of other Apple executives – Tim Cook, Scott Forstall, and Phil Schiller.

The email is dated January 24, 2011 and relays Cue’s experience with a Samsung Galaxy and how he feels it’s a market Apple should get into.

Having used a Samsung Galaxy, I tend to agree with many of the comments below (except actually moving off the iPad). I believe there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one. I expressed this to Steve several times since Thanksgiving and he seemed very receptive the last time. I found email, books, facebook and video very compelling on a 7-inch. Web browsing is definitely the weakest point, but still usable.

Fascinating stuff, expecially considering Jobs famous quote about how tablets with 7-inch screens would effectively be dead on arrival.

Remember that Jobs was asked back in 2010 why Apple wouldn’t make a smaller iPad, to which the Apple co-founder responded.

The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit that 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.

Apple is expected to launch an iPad Mini sometime in the next few months and will repotedly save on costs by forgoing a Retina Display and using the same display technology it used on the iPhond 3GS.

via 9to5Mac