The new 7-inch iPad

Call the title simple, clever, ridiculous, but it was the only thing we could think of that sounded Apple. The Apple iPad has been an impressive success for Apple, its dominated the tablet market for three full years, almost now to the fourth year. iPad is large, it’s almost 10-inches in screen size. But now the trend for tablets are becoming smaller, something we can use one handed to read a webpage, eBook, or something along that matter. The Apple iPad needs two hands to hold it securely. The rumor mill has been going at the speed of light, all the mockups, the rumors, they really do fall into play with everyone having a 7-inch tablet to put in the market, like the just announced Google Nexus 7 and of course the popular Amazon Kindle Fire.

I believe the only reason people are buying the Kindle Fire and soon to be Nexus 7 tablet is because Apple is not in this market at all. They are taking advantage of the people who want a smaller tablet than the iPad so they are totally selling them their smaller, lighter tablet. Apple is getting sick of this. This is why Apple is gearing up to launch their 7-inch iPad within the next few months here, we predict along with the new iPhone or at the latest, next March, sort of like a MacBook Air introduction, “Meet iPad’s little brother”.

So what can we expect from this new machine? Retina Display, Quad-Core CPU? Well right off the bat, the display will be a Retina display but we won’t see the massive amount of pixels that we see in the current iPad. It will either have around the same amount of pixels as the first two iPads or just a tiny bit more to give it sharper texts to appear like a Retina display. With smaller screens, you don’t need that many  pixels to fill them with. If they are going to make this tablet, they need to be AGGRESSIVE with their pricing also. Now on to power. This new iPad will also have a tweaked version of the A5X processor, maybe even changing the name to the A6 to accompany a new set of cores, two more cores than we have in the A5X chip today. Quad-Core CPUs and maybe even a higher amount of GPUs will be in store to compete with the Nexus 7′s 12-core GPU but that is highly unlikely since Apple’s iOS software is so polished.

Here is where things get tricky, the iPad as we know gives you 10 hours of battery life on WiFi and 9 hours of battery life on 3G/4G. That’s due to the massive battery pack inside the thing. With the smaller 7-inch iPad, you lose precious real-estate to store those batteries. Apple’s team will have to work like they work on their MacBook Air notebooks. They have to think smart on how to design those batteries to give you maximum charge. The new iPad will probably have a 7 hour battery life which is still very impressive in that class of products. Now how they put all that battery inside that machine is by changing with the times. With the new MacBook Pro, they left their roots of using the same charging port, using different ports and processes. This new iPad will finally feature the new charging cable, similar to micro-USB but of course it will be Apple’s own cable. The headphone jack will probably have a new location for better battery placement. Everything internally will be a different field then it is on the iPad we have today.

With these small changes and different manufacturing processes, the new iPad will be nothing short than new. Amazing, we don’t know but we have a feeling that Apple really won’t disappoint with this new tablet. We think that in the next few months, there will be a new face on the small tablet market and it will have an Apple with a bite out of it on the back. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the New 7-inch iPad.