As a Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 owner, All I was waiting for was the Retina Mini before I sold my Nexus 7.
It's been a love/hate thing with the 32GB cellular Nexus 7. The lag kills me. I open the case and sometimes it's 5 seconds before the screen comes on. The battery life is my top complaint. I use it for less than an hour while at work with brightness almost as low as it can go and the battery life goes down to 70%. Over night, it will drop to 20-30% so that's about 15 or so hours with one hour actual usage if that between charges.
My Mini can go between 12-15 hrs over two days depending on what I do with it. It's been a pleasure to use.
Then there are the apps on Android. Many of the apps that have tablet versions on iOS have only phone versions on Android so the apps scale up to fill the screen on my Nexus 7. Since owning the Nexus 7 that I bought in February, only 1 of my apps got an actual tablet version and that was the speedtest.net app.
I'll be buying the new Retina Mini and will not think twice. I bought the Nexus 7 thinking it could be a iPad replacement and it just isn't.
I'll be buying the new Nexus 4 phone after the 1st of the year so I'll keep my phone on the Android side and iPad as my tablet. I did give up using my Nexus 4 and started using my 4S until I get the new Nexus phone.
To me, nothing compares to the iPad experience.
The announcements today actually did the opposite for me. $399 for the retina mini is insane when I can get the excellent nexus 7 for $229.
I was holding out for the full sized iPad redesign but I just don't feel like spending $499 on a tablet like I thought I did. For $79 more I can get a spanking new nexus 5 AND a new nexus 7. I know cheaper is not even close to always being better but in this case it's a no brainer and I still think I'll get a fantastic experience.
Google offers the same product for $229.
Really Google offer an 8" tablet that runs iOS ?
Apple has never competed on price. I don't know why people are expecting them to now.
I've already decided on getting the new iPad Air, now it's just a matter of how I'm going to butter up my wife and justify yet another outlandish purchase.
I bet the price comes down next year.
Exactly. Android people will throw a colossal fit over the pricing, and Apple will proceed to sell millions upon millions of these things. If they were truly overpriced (and the Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab were truly leaps-and-bounds better than the iPad), the opposite would be true. And yet, it isn't.
Are the new iPads expensive? Absolutely. Are there cheaper alternatives? You bet. Does anyone at Apple (or any potential customers) care? I doubt it.
For me - I think my decision is going to come down to the Retina Mini or the Nokia 2520. The latter has me intrigued; all of the power of the Surface Pro 2 with style and functionality that only Nokia knows how to provide. I'm surprised there aren't more people talking about this one. The Nexus 7 is obviously attractive due to the price, but I keep reading review after review that complains of GPS problems, random reboots, etc. I'm willing to pay a premium to make sure the device isn't junk.
I bet the price comes down next year.
It hasn't in the last number of years, why would they start next year ? If anything the fact they have a 'starter' mini at $299 now means in all likelihood we will be seeing older models at the price and anything newer going forward at $399
I seriously doubt it--only if they release a new model and kick this one back to second string as they did with the original Mini.
Excluding the original iPhone price that was reduced two months later, Apple hasn't lowered the price of any of their new release iPhones or iPads and I wouldn't expect that to change in the foreseeable future.