But wait, didn’t Apple just introduce a 7-inch iPad mini?


Not so fast, said Tim Cook during an earnings call with analysts today. Cook rightly pointed out that the iPad mini’s display measures 7.9-inches diagonally, making it a lot closer to 8-inches and, more importantly offering a lot more overall screen real estate (35% more) than Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Google’s Nexus 7 which both are 7-inch screen devices.

“We would not make one of the 7-inch tablets, we don’t think they are good products,” said Cook. “Not just because of the 7 inches, but for many reasons, but one of the reasons is size.

“You look at the usable area of the iPad mini and it’s almost 50% to 70% more and has almost the same number of pixels as the iPad 2 which means you have access to all the  apps designed for the iPad.

“I think iPad mini is a fantastic product, not a compromised product like the 7-inch products -- it’s in another league,” Cook said.

Jobs had detailed a number of reasons about two years ago why he thought 7-inch tablets would be "dead on arrival," concluding with:

"Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphan product. Sounds like lots of fun ahead."

Earlier in today's earnings call, Jobs successor Cook took a shot at Microsoft’s new Surface tablet, calling it “a fairly compromised, confusing product.”