Size Does Matter

Steve Jobs stirred a hornet's nest with his comments about the 7" iPad competition that has been talked about for months now.

While Steve has a valid point about user interface usability, there is an even more important point to consider.

The iPad has a 9.7" diagonal screen, and the competing products have all picked a 7" screen. The trouble with a 7" screen is that you get only 45% of the screen area, so the interface has to be redesigned to fit that form factor. This redesigning is theoretically possible for some applications, while it will be impossible for some applications.

But there is another problem with having just 45% of screen real estate - you only have 45% space behind the screen to hold all the electronics and the battery. Presumably, the electronics in the iPad and the competing tablets are similar in size - so that means the space left over to hold the battery would be severely restricted for the competing pads. This only gets worse when you include bezel, because the larger screen of the iPad allows a wider bezel - on a smaller screen, the bezel has to be a lot smaller, otherwise it would be really weird.

Let us do some guesswork here.

Lets say the electronics take up 20% of the internal space in the iPad - the same electronics would take up almost half the space of the competing tablets. So while the iPad has 80% of its larger internal space left over for batteries, the competing tablets have only HALF of their SMALLER internal space left over for batteries.

This means that the competing tablets would be a lot lighter - because they have much lower battery capacity. And means that they will have a lot lesser battery life. With the math above, it is clear that the competing pads will have only about 25% of the battery capacity of the iPad.

A smaller screen will consume lesser battery - so a 45% smaller screen 7" would likely consume 45% of the power of a 9.7" screen. This is debatable, because most of the 7" screens would still have a resolution comparable to the iPad. When it comes to the power consumption of the other electronics, Apple has a massive edge with its A4 architecture - and an OS which is designed specifically for the A4.

I think most of these competing tablets will struggle to have a battery life of 3-4 hours compared to the iPad's 10 hour battery life. If Apple wants to lower the weight of the iPad, all they need to do, is lower the battery capacity by half - they will still have 5 hours battery capacity, in a much lighter device, with over twice the screen space of their competitors! Since the battery counts for significant part of the weight of the device anyway, lowering battery capacity by half should lower the weight of the device by about 25%, thus bringing it to a much more comfortable 1-lb weight.

Also with their recent acquisition of exlusive rights to LiquidMetal technology for electronic devices, Apple could lower the weight of the iPad even more by using LiquidMetal alloy for the case - without compromising the structural rigidity and durability of the iPad.

With this kind of change, Apple can sell a iPad Lite model that is 25% lighter, same flash capacity as today, at a 20% cheaper price, and still offer same screen size! Considering that most iPad use happens at homes, a 5 hour battery life is more than sufficient.

I also foresee Apple dropping the 16GB iPads, and moving to 32GB for the base model. This would be workable for Apple because of their lower costs for Flash, due to their humongous volumes, but it would be a tough act to follow for their competition.