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IGregory

macrumors 6502a
Aug 5, 2012
669
6
"Questionable Claim of 30% Slimmer 'iPad Mini Air' Launching in Late 2014"

Its just a rumor MacRumors. You know how that is don't you? :D
 

kazmac

macrumors G4
Mar 24, 2010
10,092
8,629
Any place but here or there....
Stay tuned.

I'm learning to like my retina Mini, especially now that a couple of school-related apps finally work in the environment. I still cannot do everything with an iPad, but the weight reduction would be very nice. Would I upgrade? Probably not, but less weight, better screen(colors) and battery life would certainly make me think twice.
 

iolinux333

macrumors 68000
Feb 9, 2014
1,798
73
Guys, they're going to keep making these devices thinner. Want to know why? Because they eventually want your iPhone to be able to fold open into a tablet. That's the future, and it can't happen without thinner devices first.

We'll of course many have been thinking about this for years, but how do you eliminate the seams?
 

Yebubbleman

macrumors 603
May 20, 2010
5,832
2,421
Los Angeles, CA
The iPad mini always had the air-like aesthetics, it's the full size iPad that adopted the form factor from the mini. :D

Well yeah. Still though, saying "Air-like" to describe a product that already couldn't be any more like their other "Air" designated products is just silly. The only way they could make the retina iPad mini more like the current iPad Air is to give it the ever-so-slightly faster iteration of the A7 (not important) or to give it the color gamut of the iPad Air's display (which would be significant and awesome). The display on the iPad Air is way way way nicer than the one on the retina mini dispite greater pixel density on the latter.
 

iMacFarlane

macrumors 65816
Apr 5, 2012
1,123
30
Adrift in a sea of possibilities
Thinner is neither a feature nor benefit when the product is already thin enough. Better battery? Yup. More powerful? Here here. Thinner? Yawn.

Apple is making it increasingly hard for me to want to add anymore of their offerings to my inventory. My iPad2 and 2011 MBA are perfectly serviceable and none of their recent offerings are compelling enough to me to warrant an upgrade. Screw thinner and give me a new mac mini.

But making a thinner desktop computer? Only Apple could not only pull that off, but think it was worth doing in the first place!

Make the iPad bendable and unbreakable. That would be something new. Rehashing the same old same old with incremental upgrades and thickness dimensions asymptotically approaching zero inches at the sacrifice of actually IMPROVING battery life is just craziness.
 

mixel

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2006
1,730
976
Leeds, UK
:O 5.5mm ? How wide is a headphone jack? There comes a point where we're going to have trouble plugging anything in. :D
 

Erasmus

macrumors 68030
Jun 22, 2006
2,756
298
Australia
:O 5.5mm ? How wide is a headphone jack? There comes a point where we're going to have trouble plugging anything in. :D

Since when has Apple ever cared about conforming to standards? :confused:

There was that rumour a while ago about Lightning headphones...

I could see Apple doing this, but unless they have something totally awesome in the works that would mean that Apple headphones and earbuds were the best ever, and you would never want anything else, I really hope they don't. Nobody wants to have a Lightning to 3.5mm adapter handing off their iPad.



In terms of a super thin, flexible iPad, has anyone considered how HORRIBLE that would be to use??? The only way I could see this being practical is if it was built to be rigid up until a certain (large) moment was applied to the device, at which point some structural members deform, allowing it to bend. Surely nobody wants to work on something large and floppy in their hands *insert euphemism joke here*...
 

69650

Suspended
Mar 23, 2006
3,367
1,876
England
As the “proud” owner of a Samsung tablet, I wish you luck in this endeavor.

I've no problem with using Samsung tablets. They look pretty good in the shop. I'd rather stick with the iPad but if they don't release a bigger version what else is there to do. I've switched to mainly cloud apps so it really doesn't matter what hardware I'm using any more.
 

Gudi

Suspended
May 3, 2013
4,590
3,265
Berlin, Berlin
Completely stupid that engineers have to work to find a way to improve battery technology for a slimmer design. You're doing it wrong, Cupertino. Product design works the other way around.
The most successful technology company in the history of mankind wants to disagree. :apple:
You have to begin with the technology first and then build a product, not product first and then create the technology for it. Sigh.
Isn't that exactly what they are doing? Now only after they have developed a smaller battery-saving A8 processor, they make the device thinner while keeping the same great battery life. What you demand is that new technology should not lead to redesigned products. So product innovation stops at big and heavy.
 

Tech198

Cancelled
Mar 21, 2011
15,915
2,151
thinner ??

How can u possibly get any more than what is currently is ?

Shave a few inches of here and there and it WILL be "lighter than air"

Stand back, and watch it float.
 

GeneralChang

macrumors 68000
Dec 2, 2013
1,676
1,515
I've no problem with using Samsung tablets. They look pretty good in the shop. I'd rather stick with the iPad but if they don't release a bigger version what else is there to do. I've switched to mainly cloud apps so it really doesn't matter what hardware I'm using any more.

“They look pretty good in the shop” is a good description of why I accepted the Tab 3 when it was offered to me. Since then I’ve come to a crucial realization. Samsung devices have pretty nice screens. Very bright, very colorful. An argument could be made that they're oversaturated and that you lose crispness as a result, but the fact remains that in short term use, their tablets look and feel pretty good. And I’m sure you’d love the big screen they put on the Galaxy Pro.

But after living with one for about a year, a second realization hit home. The custom kernal of Android that Samsung puts on there, along with all of their pre-loaded services, completely negate whatever hardware features drew you to the device in the first place. The software is so bad, in fact, that my quad-core, full-HD, barely-a-year-old tablet has become a tiny Netflix portal I use only when my laptop battery is nearly dead. There have been times when I’ve deliberately chosen to watch tv shows on my phone simply because the user interface on that tablet was so bad and I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it.

In short, the software they load on those things makes the hardware look bad, and in my use case, renders the whole thing completely useless. This is the kind of thing you can’t get just looking at it in the shop.
 

jasonklee

Suspended
Dec 7, 2007
623
746
The most successful technology company in the history of mankind wants to disagree. :apple:
Isn't that exactly what they are doing? Now only after they have developed a smaller battery-saving A8 processor, they make the device thinner while keeping the same great battery life. What you demand is that new technology should not lead to redesigned products. So product innovation stops at big and heavy.

Apple is putting industrial design ahead of engineering. Folks at Cupertino feel that there are benefits to an even thinner iPhone. This comes at the expense of packing in a much larger battery. The benefits of a thinner iPhone elude many members here or we simply reject the trade off and prefer that Apple simply maintain the profile of the iPhone 5 and pack in a bigger battery. But instead Apple has elected to slim down the industrial design forcing both software and hardware engineers to compromise and actually work to find a viable means of battery efficiency.

Only one of these methodologies can be properly called innovation.
 

danpass

macrumors 68030
Jun 27, 2009
2,693
482
Glory
dammit, they won't simply upgrade the processor and leave the same 'large' battery.

Double the battery life.

THAT'S A BETTER FEATURE THAN 'THINNESS' YOU STUPID BASTARDS.

TAKE YOUR MARKETING BS AND SHOVE IT!
 

macduke

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,188
19,799
We'll of course many have been thinking about this for years, but how do you eliminate the seams?

I've done some sketches and worked out how that could actually work, perhaps using technology that isn't too far off from what we have today. But I'm wanting to design the mockup first on my Mac and see how it looks, refine it, and maybe someday I'll post it on here, Behance or something like that. But I don't want to give away the idea just yet, except to say that the concept is actually fairly simple. I just need to brush up on my 3D modeling skills. I'd like to show a video of how it would open up, but otherwise I might just make a series of less realistic stills in Illustrator.
 

Erasmus

macrumors 68030
Jun 22, 2006
2,756
298
Australia
Only one of these methodologies can be properly called innovation.

I disagree. Why is it more innovative to get the same battery life out of a smaller volume, than it is to get more battery life out of the same volume?

As I don't own an iPad as of yet (I'm waiting for the 2014 model to replace my iPod Touch 4g) I can't really comment on whether the iPad needs to be thinner or if more battery life is more important. I'm simply suggesting that any innovative work that allowed the iPad to be thinner could instead be tasked to innovating an improved battery life instead. Or dedicated to increasing the clock speed of the processor. Or adding more flash storage space. Or adding extra hardware features.
 

wovel

macrumors 68000
Mar 15, 2010
1,839
161
America(s)!
Does anyone remember how absurdly thick the iPad 3 was? It is why I still own an iPad2. The mini suffers from the same thickness problem. It actually feels bigger than the iPad 2 when you hold it. It is ridiculous.

The iPad really doesn't have a battery life issue, but thickness actually is a really big deal in a tablet. I am not sure if any of the people saying the mini doesn't need to slim down have actually ever used a tablet for an extended period of time.

Really bizarre thread where people want Apple to fix a problem that doesn't exist at the expense of fixing a problem that actually does exist.
 

recoil80

macrumors 68040
Jul 16, 2014
3,117
2,755
Does anyone remember how absurdly thick the iPad 3 was? It is why I still own an iPad2. The mini suffers from the same thickness problem. It actually feels bigger than the iPad 2 when you hold it. It is ridiculous.

The iPad really doesn't have a battery life issue, but thickness actually is a really big deal in a tablet. I am not sure if any of the people saying the mini doesn't need to slim down have actually ever used a tablet for an extended period of time.

Really bizarre thread where people want Apple to fix a problem that doesn't exist at the expense of fixing a problem that actually does exist.

There's room for improvement in weight and thickness on the iPad since battery life is quite good, while I think they should add battery life and sacrifice thickness on the iPhone.
 

Lunfai

macrumors 68000
Nov 21, 2010
1,566
519
Sheffield
Well yeah. Still though, saying "Air-like" to describe a product that already couldn't be any more like their other "Air" designated products is just silly. The only way they could make the retina iPad mini more like the current iPad Air is to give it the ever-so-slightly faster iteration of the A7 (not important) or to give it the color gamut of the iPad Air's display (which would be significant and awesome). The display on the iPad Air is way way way nicer than the one on the retina mini dispite greater pixel density on the latter.

I think one of the problems manufacturing a thin and small display is the colour garmut issue, so hopefully it can be fixed in the next version :)
 

Señor

macrumors 6502
Jun 20, 2013
427
4
United States
iPad Mini Air?

It's one or the other, folks. Don't try and pull this. You're literally combining two products into one, name-wise. And that's something Apple wouldn't do.
 

Yebubbleman

macrumors 603
May 20, 2010
5,832
2,421
Los Angeles, CA
I think one of the problems manufacturing a thin and small display is the colour garmut issue, so hopefully it can be fixed in the next version :)

Makes sense. I'm certainly hopeful of that. Was sort of disappointed with the current retina mini's screen and was greatful that this current generation was my generation to upgrade my full-sized iPad and not yet the one where I update my mini (which will be this next one; because A5 to A8 will surely be a huge one; plus holy hell is the first generation iPad mini ever slow with iOS 7).
 

Lunfai

macrumors 68000
Nov 21, 2010
1,566
519
Sheffield
Makes sense. I'm certainly hopeful of that. Was sort of disappointed with the current retina mini's screen and was greatful that this current generation was my generation to upgrade my full-sized iPad and not yet the one where I update my mini (which will be this next one; because A5 to A8 will surely be a huge one; plus holy hell is the first generation iPad mini ever slow with iOS 7).

Yeah, I'm only going to update if there is Touch ID on it. I don't really care about colour since its fine for what I do.
 
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