So Apple sent out press invites yesterday for an event on October 23rd, and within about four minutes every tech blog on the planet had the same headline typed up and ready to go. "We've got a little more to show you," the invite says, next to a graphic that's basically the Apple logo built out of a bunch of tiny colored icons. Cute. Very on-brand. And of course everyone read "a little more" as a wink about a smaller iPad, because that's been the rumor simmering since basically August.
I'll be honest, my first reaction wasn't excitement. It was more like a sigh. Not because I don't like new hardware, I obviously do, this is a tech blog and I've been writing about gadgets since this site started last November. It's because the whole invite-parsing thing has gotten a little exhausting. There's now an entire cottage industry of people zooming in on a JPEG looking for pixel-level clues about product names, screen sizes, event venues, whatever. Somebody will inevitably notice the exact shade of gray used in the graphic and write six hundred words about what it "confirms." It's become its own genre and I say that as someone who reads way too much of it with my coffee every morning.
That said. A smaller iPad does make a certain kind of sense to me, and I say this as a guy who has a full-size iPad that mostly lives on my nightstand because it's slightly too much of a commitment to carry around. Google put out the Nexus 7 back in the summer for $199 and it sold fine. Amazon has been hammering the small-tablet space with the Kindle Fire lineup for almost a year now, and the new Paperwhite reader just started shipping a week and a half ago at $119, which is a genuinely great little device if you're just reading text on it (I haven't bought one yet, mostly out of stubbornness, I already own too many e-readers). Point is, there's clearly a market for something between a phone and a full iPad, and right now Apple is the one company sitting that segment out.
My actual skepticism is about price. If this thing lands anywhere near $329 or $349, which is where a lot of people seem to be guessing, that's not really competing with the Nexus 7, that's just a smaller expensive iPad that happens to undercut the big one by a hundred bucks. I don't think "cheaper than our other product" is the same thing as "competitive," and I'll be a little annoyed if that's the whole pitch. We'll know in twelve days either way, so I guess there's no point litigating it further right now.
Unrelated tangent, but the other thing I was half-watching this week was the Red Bull Stratos jump, the one where the guy (Felix Baumgartner, and yes I had to look up the spelling again) was supposed to ride a helium balloon up to the edge of space and then just jump out of it. That was originally set for Tuesday and got scrubbed because of wind, which, fair, I would also not want to freefall through gusty air from 23 miles up. No new date as of this morning that I've seen. I had a livestream tab open at work for like two hours waiting for nothing, which is a very normal and productive use of a Tuesday.
Windows 8 is still marching toward its October 26th release too, so it's genuinely a weird little stretch where three separate "big tech things" are all queued up within about a week and a half of each other. I don't think that's a coincidence exactly, companies clearly like landing announcements ahead of the holiday shopping season, but it does make the next couple weeks feel a little front-loaded. Anyway. Mark your calendar for the 23rd, I guess, and if Apple actually calls this thing the "iPad mini" I want credit for correctly guessing the boring, obvious name back in September when nobody was paying me for predictions.