Marco.org

Introducing The Magazine: a modern iOS Newsstand publication for geeks like us that’s loosely about technology, but also gives tech writers a venue to explore other topics that like-minded geeks might find interesting.

The Magazine’s introductory article explains it in detail, but here’s the short version: the same way Build and Analyze is for developers but not always about development, The Magazine is for geeks like us and will often, but not always, be about technology.

It publishes four articles every two weeks for $1.99 per month with a 7-day free trial. Get the app to start. It’s best on iPad.

I chose to do this for many reasons, and I’ll go into more detail over the coming weeks as I finally get some time to write it all out. But, again, here’s the short version:

• I want this publication to exist as a reader and a writer.
• Being a publisher of other authors’ work is an interesting challenge I’ve never tackled.
• I’m in a strong position to try this.
• It complements Instapaper nicely.

The writer angle, to me, is particularly interesting.

We’ve seen a lot of business-model experimentation in online publishing over the last decade, especially in the last few years. Even Readability’s now-abandoned payment system, while fatally flawed in practice, was an interesting idea.

But just as the App Store has given software developers a great new option for accepting direct payment, Newsstand has given publishers an even bigger opportunity with subscription billing and prominent placement. Yet most publishers aren’t experimenting with radical changes. They can’t — to fund their huge staffs and production costs, they can’t afford to deviate from yesterday’s model. And most individual writers can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t make their own Newsstand apps.

There’s room for another category between individuals and major publishers, and that’s where The Magazine sits. It’s a multi-author, truly modern digital magazine that can appeal to an audience bigger than a niche but smaller than the readership of The New York Times. This is what a modern magazine can be, not a 300 MB stack of static page images laid out manually by 100 people.

The Magazine supports writers in the most basic, conventional way that, in the modern web context, actually seems least conventional and riskiest: by paying them to write. Since I’m keeping production costs low, I’m able to pay writers reasonably today, and very competitively with high-end print magazines in the future if The Magazine gets enough subscribers.

It’s a risk, but I’m confident. Here goes.

BUG NOTE: Of course, it’s a 1.0 and there’s already a bug I didn’t catch in testing. If you have multiple devices (e.g. an iPad and an iPhone), the subscription will only validate on the first one you subscribe with. The fix should be approved soon. In the meantime, if you’re trying to choose between devices, I suggest reading The Magazine on iPad.

I can’t find it in the App Store by searching for “The Magazine”.

Eventually, as the app’s reputation improves, this will probably fix itself. Until then, searches for “Marco Arment” include it, here’s the direct link, and there’s a Smart App Banner on the-magazine.org.

Is it U.S.-only?

No, but you may have trouble searching for it. See above.

Why is it called “The Magazine: For geeks like us.” in the App Store?

“The Magazine” was already taken, apparently by an app that’s not currently published. Developers often squat on names like this. Apple doesn’t permit two apps with exactly the same name, so I had to add that tagline.

Is this just tech news? I already have enough tech news for free.

No. Articles in The Magazine will occasionally be about tech news, but will rarely be tech news.

I subscribed on my iPhone and can’t subscribe on my iPad.

Sorry, this was a bug in the 1.0 release with the in-app-purchase handling. The 1.0.1 update fixes it, which is currently in review by Apple. I’m hoping it will be approved tonight.

Designers?

The design was a collaboration with Pacific Helm, who were excellent to work with.

I’m a weird client for a designer to have, since I’m a product designer with strong opinions, minimal visual-design skills, and little patience. Pacific Helm worked with my difficulties without even making me feel like I was being difficult, brought incredible talent and skill to the project, iterated quickly, and met my aggressive schedule, so we made a great team.

Settings?

There’s no settings screen. With a brand new app, I wanted the freedom to reduce options, which forced me to make good default choices and cut unnecessary complexity from the interface.

Links are opening in Chrome. Bug or feature?

Feature. If you have Chrome installed, The Magazine will open external links in Chrome instead of Safari.

Why does the “Send to Instapaper” button in the action sheet use that perforated-metal style like the Copy button?

In the iOS 6 API to use those action sheets, custom actions added by the application must use that style. Developers can only supply a grayscale image that’s used like a mask, not full-color icons like the built-in Mail, Message, Twitter, Facebook, and Weibo buttons.

Why is the Instapaper logout button in the action sheet?

I’m not crazy about that. But since there’s no settings screen, and sending to Instapaper is a one-tap action with no intermediate “compose” screen, I don’t think there’s anywhere better to put it.

Why do I get asked for my name, email, and ZIP code?

Honestly, I’d rather opt out of the collection of that information. But I can’t: Apple has tied that prompt to all auto-renewable subscriptions.

Why does it require iOS 6?

It uses some iOS 6-only features and fonts, and it’s architected for iOS 6’s gesture handling. Setting this high baseline also greatly simplifies testing, maintenance, and future updates.

Will articles be viewable on the web?

Probably. I haven’t decided how to do that yet — I might restrict it, for example, to only articles older than a certain age.

Will you add pagination, like Instapaper?

Maybe. If I do, it will probably only be the “Fast Pagination” mode, not the “iBooks-Style Pagination” with the page-curl animation, which requires far too much complexity and performs too poorly on the iPad 3.

But I’m not sure that pagination is necessary here. It comes with a moderate interface cost that may not be worthwhile in this app. I’ll think about it.

Ads?

Today? None.

In the future, I can’t be sure. I don’t want to commit to no-ads-forever today, then need them down the line and need to backtrack. So I’m not saying there will never be ads, but I’m trying to avoid them, and I think I’ll be able to.

Kindle edition?

No, but I’m looking into it.

Android?

No. A simultaneous Android release would have made the first version much more expensive and time-consuming to develop before I find out whether this is actually going to be a sustainable business. But I also have doubts about the viability of this business model on Android in general. By not addressing that market, I’m missing out on some revenue, but I’m not sure I’m missing out on much profit.

Will it ever send to Pocket? Readability? Other read-later services?

No.

Why is it rated “12+” for infrequent drugs, alcohol, and profanity?

I wanted the freedom to discuss these topics or use profanity sparingly in articles when warranted.

Can I write for The Magazine?

I’d love to hear from you. Email me an article pitch.

Each issue only has four articles, but I’d like to encourage author diversity. So while there are few slots, that doesn’t mean you can’t get one.

The next available slot is in Issue 4, and authors are always paid for their work.

Can I license The Magazine’s code to make my own Newsstand app?

I’m not in that business today. I don’t know if I’ll go there in the future. It brings a lot of overhead that I probably won’t have time for.

Is this really going to work? Are people really going to pay?

If a good portion of today’s free-trial subscribers let their subscriptions continue into the paid period next week, it will be profitable then, just one week after launch. And I’m hoping they will, because not only will The Magazine be able to continue indefinitely, but I’ll be able to raise the author payment rates sooner than I expected.

Give people an easy way to support something they like, and they will.

Good press or reviews from today?

• MacStories
• The Next Web
• iMore
• Daring Fireball
• CNN Money

Thanks, everyone.

13” Retina MacBook Pro

Looks like an excellent computer: the perfect choice for nearly everyone.

Prior to this, the computer I recommended for nearly everyone was the 13” MacBook Air. But the new 13” Retina MacBook Pro is only about 0.6 pounds heavier, has much higher CPU, RAM, and storage options, and has the much nicer Retina screen. It commands a premium of about $500, which is significant, but you get much more for it.

This is now the computer I’ll recommend that most people get.

For extremely demanding people (like me), the 15” Retina MacBook Pro still has much faster CPUs (quad-core instead of dual-core) and much more screen space, so it’s probably the better choice. But I bet most people will be happier with the 13”.

Since the old 13” and 15” MacBook Pros are still for sale and getting CPU updates, Apple now has an unwieldy laptop lineup: 11” MacBook Air, 13” MacBook Air, 13” MacBook Pro, 13” Retina MacBook Pro, 15” MacBook Pro, 15” Retina MacBook Pro. Six very different models for only three sizes.

Having three very different 13” models is especially awkward. I bet the 13” MacBook Pro and 13” MacBook Air, in that order, are Apple’s two best-selling models, making it difficult to discontinue either of them yet.

iMac

The high-end iMacs continue to race past the neglected Mac Pro, now with USB 3, Thunderbolt, less-reflective screens, and extremely competitive CPUs and GPUs.

Fusion Drive might be the most interesting announcement today for our day-to-day computing. Similar SSD-as-cache arrangements have been kicking around in the Windows PC market for a while, and the Seagate Momentus XT brought a large cache to laptop drives a few years ago, but these have only brought mixed success and mediocre improvements so far.

With tight OS integration, larger performance gains are possible. I can’t wait to see how these perform in general use, and which Macs will be able to use this technology. For instance, it’d be great for Disk Utility to be able to logically combine any installed SSD and hard disk in all Mac models, especially for the Mac Pro and the previous-generation iMacs that were sold with separate SSDs and hard disks. It would be a shame for Fusion Drive to be limited only to the new iMac.

Mac Mini

The same, but faster. Yay.

Mac Pro

What Mac Pro? You mean the only major Apple product that wasn’t updated in 2012, and in fact hasn’t been updated since 2010?

The Mac Pro will continue to lose customers to the iMac and Retina MacBook Pros.

iPad 4

I’m glad the full-sized iPad was updated today. The third-generation iPad (which most of us call the iPad 3) is a good product, but it has four annoying flaws:

• It’s heavier and thicker than the iPad 2.
• It needs such a huge battery to power the A5X, Retina screen, and previous-generation LTE radio that it takes a long time to fully charge.
• The CPU is no faster than the iPad 2’s, and for CPU-bound graphics operations, could actually be four times slower since they’re working on so many more pixels. GPU speed was increased to compensate, but not every graphics operation runs entirely on the GPU.
• It runs noticeably warm after a while, presumably mostly from the massive A5X CPU.

The new fourth-generation iPad (which, presumably, we can safely call the iPad 4) is approximately the same size and weight as the iPad 3, so the battery is probably similarly specced, and similarly time-consuming to charge. So we’re probably still stuck with the first two.

The new A6X CPU is promising, though: it’s presumably based on the same (awesome and cooler-running) “Swift” CPUs in the A6, with more memory bandwidth and GPU power to drive the larger screen. Going from the iPad 2 to 3, Apple kept CPU power the same and increased GPU power, but only to drive the larger screen, so it was mostly a wash. From the iPad 3 to 4, we’re finally likely to see a welcome and necessary improvement in both CPU and GPU performance.

The new iPads are probably also using the new low-power LTE chipset from the iPhone 5, so with the presumed reduction in power needs for the LTE radio and the CPU, it’s worth considering why the iPad 4 still needs such a big, heavy battery. It’s probably because the Retina panel and backlight are much bigger power hogs than the A5X or prior-generation LTE radio. But since so much of the screen’s power becomes light, not heat, I think it’s reasonable to assume that most of the iPad 3’s heat was from the A5X and the iPad 4 might run significantly cooler.

I would have liked to see them reduce the weight of the full-sized iPad as well, but maybe that just wasn’t possible with the huge Retina screen’s battery requirements yet.

The timing of the update — just 6 months after the iPad 3, instead of the usual year — will anger a lot of iPad 3 owners. But the previous March releases of the iPad 2 and 3 were more problematic.

Many people give or receive iPads for the holidays, and their new gifts were one-upped by new models just a few months later. This undoubtedly caused some buyers not to give iPads as holiday gifts, waiting for the new models instead.

Furthermore, there’s much stronger tablet competition from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft now, and they’re all timing their updates for the fall, shortly before the cultural disaster of holiday shopping mania. Keeping the iPad on a spring update schedule would mean that 6-month-old iPads were competing with brand-new models from everyone else, and everyone else’s models were able to get more press attention without competition from Apple, during the most important buying season of the year.

The iPad 3’s time as the best iPad model was short-lived, and that’s unfortunate for people who bought one and care about having the best, but a fall update schedule will be better in the long run.

iPad Mini (If I can say “iPad 4”, I can capitalize “Mini”.)

There weren’t many surprises, and that’s a good thing. It looks like a great iPad that I can’t wait to try.

I don’t mind the lack of a Retina screen in the first version. As we can see from the iPad 3 and 4, lighting and driving a 2048x1536 screen just can’t be done well in a small, thin, light, inexpensive device yet. Maybe next fall, or maybe the year after that.

I think it’s reasonable to assume from the other Retina products that GPU power and current draw, not the cost of the LCD panels themselves, are the main limiting factors to Retina adoption.

I do wish they were more aggressive on the Mini’s pricing. $329 is a strange price, and not very competitive against other low-cost tablets like the $199 Nexus 7 or the $159 Kindle Shitbox With Ads.

Apple’s messaging is clear: they make premium products, and they’re worth the higher price. They don’t address the low end of most markets they’re in. They’re doing the same for tablets: addressing only the midrange and high end. It will probably work well and profitably, and they’ll sell so many of these that they’ll likely be supply-constrained for the entire holiday season.

But they know that most people won’t buy the base model without a Smart Cover or AppleCare. The average selling price, especially if attachments are included, is going to be much higher than $329. So why not get more people in the door with a more aggressive entry price, such as the close but far more appealing $299?

One reason might be Wall Street: Apple’s financials have met lukewarm receptions by investors and analysts recently, and Tim Cook is still under extreme scrutiny in Steve Jobs’ shadow. A holiday quarter with strong sales volumes but smaller average profit margins might be a worse outcome than losing a bit of ground to cheaper tablets. But I don’t think Apple would put a high-profile product at risk to keep the stock price up.

Which iPad Mini/4 should I get?

If you’re planning on ordering an iPad Mini, and this will be your first iPad, I’ll reiterate my previous advice on getting a 4G model versus getting a Wi-Fi-only model and tethering: I’ve found that I use my iPad more, bring it with me more, and am generally happier with it when it has its own cellular data service.

If you have roughly $100 to allocate to either more storage or the 3G option, I’d pick the 3G option.

That said, 16 GB is too small if you plan to sync a lot of media to it or install a lot of games, especially those gigabyte-sized high-profile 3D games. I’d only recommend 16 GB if your primary uses will be email, web browsing, reading, other “productivity” apps, and casual gaming, and you won’t want to keep many videos, photos, songs, or podcasts on it at once.

My favorite configuration, therefore, is the 32 GB size with 4G. Color is your call: I think the Mini might be the first iPad I order in white.

On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store, coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)

They had set up a table and an Xbox demo in the hallway and were giving away “Microsoft Surface”-branded disposable rain ponchos (this entire mall is indoors, including the parking, and it didn’t rain today) and muffin fragments (much like when you order a soda on a plane, they pour a third of it into a little plastic cup full of hollow ice cylinders, and they don’t let you keep the rest of the can). An employee with a microphone in front of the Xbox kiosk was talking to the audience of nobody as if it were a dance party.

The store is creepy: so many elements are embarrassingly similar to the Apple Store on the next floor. Microsoft even ripped off trivial elements that easily could have been different, such as the employee uniform. There’s a huge elephant in the room, and we can all see it, but Microsoft still implicitly denies it.

There were far more employees than customers, and I was curious, so I thought I’d stop in to take a look at Microsoft’s new tablet. The employees in the store were overly enthusiastic, especially for 3:47 PM, and practically mobbed anyone who entered. “HEY! WELCOME TO THE MICROSOFT STORE! WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRY THE NEW SURFACE?”

The salesman launched into an elaborate pitch. He wasn’t a confident speaker, so the rote was obvious. I wanted to jump right in and start playing with the software, but the salesman kept butting in and driving “my” demo.

The first thing he had me do was detach and reattach the keyboard cover. Click. He sold the keyboard cover hard. “Nobody else has a cover like this.”

The staff loved Adam so much that he later vomited in the Apple Store.

The salesman then showed off the kickstand and started flipping through the applications himself. I wondered if this was how the press got to “use” the Surface before today.

When we finally broke the salesman’s concentration so we could pick it up and start playing with it, Tiff and I both had the same first impression: it’s heavy. On paper, it’s 1.5 pounds (without the half-pound keyboard), like the iPad 1 and a bit heavier than the iPad 3. But it’s not just heavy: it feels dense, like the iPhone 4 and 4S (and notably not like the iPhone 5).

Like the Zune, the Surface might always be competing with the previous-generation iPad. Microsoft has approximately matched the weight of the already-too-heavy iPad 3 right as Apple is releasing the far lighter iPad Mini. (And Microsoft just launched this tablet at $500 as everyone else is moving to much lower pricing.)

I tried rotating the Surface. There was a long enough delay that I thought rotation just wasn’t supported, then it kicked in and the newly laid out screen just popped in. No transition, no animation. I switched to a different app and tried the same thing with the same results. Rotation was always slow and sloppy.

My demo was interrupted as another employee walked through the store, shouting enthusiastically, “WE HAVE WORKSHOPS IN THE BACK!” Nobody followed him there.

The diagonally-oriented camera is strange. In the one orientation it’s optimized for, it’s slightly annoying. In any other orientation, it’s almost intolerable. If I brought home a Surface and didn’t know this was a design decision, I might assume the camera was broken and return it.

The maps app is very sluggish and doesn’t use vector graphics, making it feel old.

iOS is so responsive and so liberal with animations that it has a very tactile feel, and rather than thinking “tap this button to open” or “swipe across this box to share”, conceptually, you just move the things on the screen with your fingers.

The distinction seems subtle, but it’s important. Every action on the Surface feels deliberate. It feels like you’re using a computer.

The standard gestures don’t help, requiring many in-from-the-edge swipes that not only aren’t discoverable but also frequently conflict with scrolling. My gestures often didn’t work, and it wasn’t clear whether there just wasn’t a hidden context menu at that moment or I just screwed up the swipe.

Most of the animations also aren’t helpful, with minimal spatial consistency. Many animations seem arbitrary, not hinting at anything behaviorally useful. Microsoft has applied animations and gestures in Windows 8 about as effectively as they applied color in Windows XP and transparency in Windows Vista: they knew that Apple had been successful with these features, so they made a checklist and just applied them haphazardly. “Apple does animations, so now we do animations! Apple does gestures, so now we have gestures!”

An employee was stationed by these big letters on the floor to instruct people to exit to the left, rather than stepping over them. I’ve never been given instructions on how to exit “other stores”.

The keyboards are both decent but unmemorable. Every Surface had its own Touch Cover (no physical key movement), and the employees were frantically passing around a single Type Cover (traditional slim keys). Since everyone wanted to try the Type Cover, I only got a few seconds with it, but it was comparable to good iPad keyboards like Logitech’s.

The Touch Cover is one of the Surface’s biggest innovations. I thought I would hate it, but I didn’t. It’s not like typing on a completely flat surface: each “key” is raised slightly, so while there isn’t any mechanical feedback, it does feel a bit like a keyboard.

But since it responds to touches rather than mechanical pressure, you can’t rest your fingers on it without triggering key presses. Your fingers must hover over it, which makes it easy to get misaligned from your expected positions and type a bunch of wrong characters. I had a hard time keeping alignment when I needed to stretch for the boundary keys, including Shift. Every time I typed a capital letter, I mistyped the next few letters.

I couldn’t type on the Touch Cover significantly faster than with the on-screen keyboard, so I question its purpose. Moreover, since the Touch Cover and Type Cover are so close in price and nearly indistinguishable in size and weight, I’m not sure why the Touch Cover exists at all other than to be different from “other tablets”. I don’t know why someone would get it instead of the Type Cover.

I went to another Surface and was greeted by another salesman. He also aggressively demoed the tablet for me, not letting me take over for more than three seconds at a time. It was obvious that they had all had the same training and were instructed to hard-sell the same talking points. The pitches were aggressive, fast-paced, and competitively defensive: they often mentioned “other tablets” and didn’t let me forget which features were “not available on any other tablet”.

He kept showing me the home screen and how to rearrange my icons, even though I kept wanting to explore the apps.

He showed me Office, which was almost unusable: it was extremely sluggish, and touch targets were tiny and difficult to hit. He said this was the only tablet that could run Office, and if you used Office at work, this was therefore the only tablet that you could use at work. I played dumb.

He asked what kind of computer I had at home. I told him the truth: that I used to have PCs, but now I had an old Mac and wanted to see the newer options out there.

He showed me the L-shaped magnetic power connector, which can be plugged in either way, and showed how the magnet safely disconnects when the cable is pulled. It was vaguely familiar, but I continued to play dumb.

I asked about 3G options, which the Surface doesn’t have. He said it would restrict me from being able to use it anywhere (?), so I pushed a little further, and he said nobody wants two bills and you can just use tethering and why mess with the pesky 3G connection?

He started selling me on the screen quality, saying it had a better screen than any other tablet. I asked, “What do you mean? Which other tablets?”

I couldn’t get him to say “iPad”, but he did say it was better than “Retina screens”.

I broke character slightly. “I don’t know, I saw the Retina iPad upstairs and I can’t see the pixels at all on it. On here, I can see the pixels clearly.”

“No you can’t. Where can you see the individual pixels?”

“Right there. See, the left stroke on that capital ‘D’ has one solid pixel on the left and a half-shaded pixel on the right.”

He scaled the icon up to “zoom in”, which, of course, changes what the physical pixels display. “I can’t see any pixels!”

I gave up. It was like arguing with a Tea Partier. But I figured, now that I had broken character a little, I’d risk a bit more.

An Apple Store employee had stopped by after his shift, with the original blue shirt over his shoulder, to check out the Surface across from us. We smiled at him. I asked my salesman, “Did you apply to work at the Apple Store upstairs first, or did you always want to work here?”

“No, I went right here. Always been a PC guy. I like being able to customize things, like upgrading my sound card—”

I couldn’t resist. “Oh, can you upgrade the sound card in the Surface?”

“No, but… I started working here before the Surface came out.” (This Microsoft Store opened 28 days ago.) “But you can add more RAM to this, right over here, this is an SDXC slot, which means Extra Capacity.”

Like John Moltz, I’m left to ask the question: why buy a Surface instead of an iPad? For the price, you can almost buy two baseline iPad Minis. Or you can buy a 32 GB iPad Mini with LTE and a Smart Cover.

But I don’t think many Surface buyers are going to comparison-shop with the iPad, or vice versa. It’s very clear who the Surface is for, and it’s not us.

The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable. In that world, this is a groundbreaking new tablet that you can finally use at work and leave your big creaky plastic Dell laptop behind when you go to the conference room to have a conference call on the starfish phone with all of the wires and dysfunctional communication.

But it’s also for people like that salesman who don’t agree with Apple’s choices: people who want to have more hardware options, more customization, more hackability, and fewer people saying “no” to what they can do on their devices.

Apple’s products say, “You can’t do that because we think it would suck.” Microsoft’s products say, “We’ll let you try to do anything on anything if you really want to, even if it sucks.”

People who dislike Apple’s approach or whose requirements are incompatible with it will always exist in great numbers, and the Surface is for them. It’ll probably sell well, especially if Microsoft can expand their retail presence quickly.

But it’s not for me at all. Not even for testing, experimenting, or curiosity. It feels too much like using a Windows PC, which was exactly Microsoft’s intention, and it will appeal to people who want that. But that’s a world I fled 8 years ago with no intention of returning.

Last Friday, like many Apple fans and developers, I woke up in the middle of the night to order one of the first iPad Minis so I can test my apps and make any needed tweaks. But my wife wants my iPad 3, so I’m upgrading to the iPad 4 for myself. And I did the impatient-developer hedge on the Mini: since 4G models aren’t being delivered until November 21, I ordered a Wi-Fi Mini to arrive first and a 4G model for potential primary use to arrive later. So I actually ordered three iPads:

• iPad Mini, base model (16 GB, Wi-Fi): for immediate testing and app updates. Arrives November 2.
• iPad Mini, decked out (32 GB, 4G): for possible primary use. Arrives November 21.
• iPad “4”, decked out (32 GB, 4G): for possible primary use. Arrives November 21.

But I’m not planning to keep them all, or even to let them all ship, because I see two possible outcomes:

• I don’t like the iPad Mini for daily use, in which case I’ll keep it for testing, cancel the decked-out Mini 4G before it ships, and upgrade myself to the “4” when it arrives. Or…
• I like the iPad Mini so much that I want it as my primary iPad, in which case I’ll return the Wi-Fi one and cancel the “4” before it ships, and switch to the decked-out Mini when it arrives.

The latter might sound implausible. After all, the iPad Mini is non-Retina! Eww! And it’s just an iPad 2 internally! Old! Fail!

The first-generation MacBook Air was greeted with similar complaints. The CPU is so old and slow! The hard drive is so small! Why would anyone want that?

It was a painful computer to own. It was extremely slow, but it was just so damn nice, small, and light that it accumulated many die-hard fans who tolerated the slowness. Once you saw one, you couldn’t help but want it. Every other laptop instantly became a chunky brick by comparison. So when the second generation was released in 2010 with huge speed improvements and much lower prices, it was an instant mass-market hit, and now many of us are using MacBook Airs as our only computers.

I predict that the iPad Mini will follow a similar path, but with a big running start: the first generation doesn’t look bad at all, and it’s cheaper. It’s more like if the MacBook Air started with the 2010 generation.

In fact, the only significant downside that I see so far is the non-Retina screen. (The CPU is as fast as the iPad “3”.) But the higher pixel density will look nicer than the crude-looking iPad 2 screen, and you’d be amazed how many people don’t really care much about Retina screens.

To most people, the iPad Mini will be a no-brainer over the iPad “4”. It’s much smaller and lighter, which we almost always want from our portable devices, it’s much cheaper, and it runs all of the same apps.

I have no doubt that the iPad Mini will be the best-selling iPad from now on. iPad 2 and “3” owners may not rush to “upgrade” to the Mini, but I bet new purchasers will overwhelmingly choose it. I bet it’s the one that most of us will be using two years from now, and maybe even sooner.