Phil Schiller says iPad mini wasn’t a response to smaller-sized Android tablets

A few months after the release of the original iPad, Steve Jobs had famously said that Apple didn’t make a smaller iPad since they felt the screen was too small. A few years later, the company introduced the iPad mini, with internal emails revealing that Apple execs found smaller Android tablets great for common tasks like surfing, email and books. Despite all of this, Phil Schiller, in the ongoing Apple-Samsung retrial, said that the iPad mini wasn’t a response to the competition, which mainly consisted of Android tablets. From CNET: Samsung, meanwhile, tried to show that even Apple responds to rivals — such as with the iPad Mini — and that it’s not illegal to replicate designs as long as they’re not infringing on patents. Schiller, however, argued that the iPad Mini, Apple’s 7.9-inch tablet, wasn’t designed in response to competition such as Samsung’s smaller tablets. “We were not trying to respond to competition,” Schiller said. “We were simply trying to make our product better.” Schiller’s statement is quite bold, since there’s a bunch of evidence that suggests Apple did respond to the competition. Here’s the email Eddy Cue sent internally about smaller tablets: Having used a Samsung Galaxy, I tend to agree with many of [the benefits of a smaller tablet]. I believe there will be a 7″ market and we should do one. Apple execs believed that a smaller tablet market would exist, and unless they entered this market, it could possibly be taken over by rivals like Samsung. So in a way, Apple did respond to the competition. In fact, during Apple’s iPad mini keynote, the company specifically compared it to Google’s Nexus 7. Tell us what you think about Schiller’s statements in the comments below. Do you think he’s right, in that the iPad mini wasn’t a response to the competition? Continue reading →

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