Take the iPhone4 launch. A new phone with a slightly higher resolution screen, but significantly smaller than the existing competition. Their framing, with retina branding, switched the existing conversation from screen size, not to resolution even (where apple had a minor lead, that would be soon overtaken) to PPI! There was almost no discussion of PPI before this. Apple competitors were now framed as 'worse' if they included a screen with the same resolution but bigger! Insane!

Now fast-forward to 2012, and we have a new iPad marketed as 35% bigger screen (again they have found a metric that maximises the difference, which would normally be framed as the 7" vs 7.9"), no mention of resolution.

Apple would never even show a competitor on their site, because they are the market leader.. but see Mac vs PC for what happens when they are not.

I wonder if Google was brilliant or lucky pricing the Nexus 7 at $199. They created this dilemma for Apple. They can't have the Mini cannabalize the more profitable iPad (the % of which must increase measurably by every $20 price differential) so they can't get close to $199. Amazon and Google smell blood in the water. iOS and the ecosystem is clearly superior to its Android brethren right now. However, a 65% premium for a device many acknowledge is a web surfer/facebook/email checker feels too rich. These guys will get a solid toehold in the market and in 2 - 3 years from now there will be an S III equivalent to the larger iPad's.

Apple made itself vulnerable to this sort of attack by basing building so much of their recent advertising campaigns upon display specifications - i.e. retina.

By focusing on something which is easily (and perhaps misleadinly) reduced to numbers, pixels, they have opened the way to the sort of simple value proposition Amazon's page suggests.

Edit: Wait, you say the 8GB $199 is close to $250 after shipping, but the 16GB is $275 including shipping? Which is it? Either shipping is close to $50 or $25 exactly. Seems like you are trying to stretch the facts to justify your purchase.

I did notice that as of today 10/29 Nexus 7 prices/configurations have been updated, so it is now 16GB for $199 or the new 32GB for $249. The 8GB model is discontinued.

In any event, the $199 price struck me as highly misleading at the time.

And note that I paid $26.44 shipping + tax on a $249 base price, so somehow my shipping was significantly cheaper than yours.

What I can verify is that I paid $275.44 for a "$249" 16GB Nexus 7 whereas a Kindle Fire HD would actually be $199.

It's amazing that a complete computer with screen and a multitouch interface sells for $275 or $199. $200 is how much a couple people can easily spend in one day at Disneyworld, or the price of a night at a decent hotel and a couple restaurant meals.

During the Keynotes when Steve Jobs would show off the computers they'd run their Photoshop or really large Excel file tests to show just powerful their chips were. If I remember right, all of those tests were highly selective. For most regular computing tasks, I felt like PC's were faster.

In marketing, if you're in second place it doesn't hurt many times to attack first place. In the consumers minds, you're putting yourself on similar footing to the first place contender and then getting to highlight specific differences that make whatever case you want.

It many not be elegant but Amazon's promotions and Samsung's recent phone ads do illustrate differences between the products. They may not be the most important differences to a lot of people but the burden is on Apple to show that, not on competitors to follow a vague sense of fairness.

I don't particularly take offense at the Amazon ad. When it comes down to it, people will only care about the Kindle for the price. It's already shown to be slow and Amazon has some weird data collection/spying things that have popped up with Silk (although most people will not care about this). Apple will never beat anyone on price and they don't care about this.

If you care about how things are made, the quality of the OS, etc (the usual thing's Apple sells products on), then the extra $100+ for the market leader won't be an issue. Again, Apple knows this and they consistently state that they're not interested in the bottom of the barrel. And anyways, Apple can't win in the low price points, Android has that market wrapped up.

So, I think it's good that Amazon has this. They've taken a page outta Apple's play book. And if anything, all this pressure might force Apple to drop to $299. They've reduced prices before, but somehow, at this point in time with their dominance, I doubt they will. They have enough cash in the bank to allow the Mini to flop if it has to...

For example, the iPhone 5 was launched as the world's thinnest smartphone, but it wasn't true. Ask any owner or reviewer of the Fujitsu Arrow.

Speaking of aggressive runner-ups, it will be interesting to see how Samsung behaves in the future. Right now, they are still at the "Mac vs PC" stage.[1][2] And they're highly effective too - they've pushed the Note form factor from ridicule into the mainstream. Are they too big already to launch another comparative ad campaign?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf5-Prx19ZM, [2] http://www.droid-life.com/2012/09/17/this-full-page-galaxy-s...

Not to say that you can't defend what you like, but most of what you've written here is very very subjective. One could argue otherwise too, and which is what is happening right here - You're adding subjectivity to your claims and provoking a 'fanboy' war. This is unacceptable.

For example, if I were to counter you, I would then say the entire of Apple's presentations and Marketing is just plain BS. For example they frequently market saying "The world's best Operating System (referring to Mac OS)" or "The fastest phone ever" etc. while these are not true. The iPhone for instance, still runs on a dual core processor. How the fuck can it be the 'fastest' while high-performance quadcore chips were long released even before this phone came into existence?

Where were you during Apple's presentations? I never saw you arguing "Hey that's not true, this is disingenuous" while they marketed their products in a similar fashion.

So may I kindly request you to cut the crap and stop the bias and avoid provoking people into such techno-wars?

Thanks

This has absolutely no relevance, i hope one is still allowed to be critical of something without simultaneously pointing out all similar flaws in the universe.

> For example, if I were to counter you, I would then say the entire of Apple's presentations and Marketing is just plain BS

Except it doesn't counter anything OP said, since he didn't talk a bit about Apple marketing. Also, OP is providing a constructive analysis, which is quite better than just "this is BS"

> So may I kindly request you to cut the crap and stop the bias and avoid provoking people into such techno-wars?

You are the one using abrasive language here. I did read OP as an interresting (and opinionnated) analysis of what amazon did to make their product seem better.

A lot of what you have written here is quite subjective, and in fact you could mount a case that Apple's marketing team do the same sort if things as has been demonstrated by Amazon.

There is no need to flame the original poster. Please reconsider whether the last three sentences were necessary to contribute to the conversation here at HN. In my opinion, they were needlessly inflammatory.

You then go on to provide evidence in the form of asserting that everything Apple says is "just plain BS" and go on to quote things you assert Apple frequently says which are either (a) not things Apple says or (b) general purpose unassailable and unverifiable claims (best, most comfortable, happiest, etc.).

"Disingenuous" means "lying while pretending to be sincere" versus merely lying -- the key component is hypocrisy. The classic example is when almost anyone starts a sentence with "Well, to be honest..." Another example would be making references to a thread on civility while blatantly insulting someone.

Amazon quoting Gizmodo is disingenuous. The rest of the ad is simply Amazon highlighting the good bits of their product against the correspondingly inferior bits of the rival product.

The fact that Amazon has failed to update its "fastest WiFi of any tablet" graph (despite clearly having updated it since the iPad mini was launched) might also be construed negatively.

A similar ad from Apple would probably discuss size of app library, iOS vs ???, camera quality, size, weight, thinness, and quote professors, school teachers, and reputable reviewers.

Apple claiming their OS is the best in the world is at worst lying and most likely actually what they believe. (Most Mac users probably believe it, even if they recognize that no OS is perfect, right?)

  > How the fuck can it be the 'fastest' while
  > high-performance quadcore chips were long released
  > even before this phone came into existence?

  > So may I kindly request you to cut the crap and stop the bias and avoid
  > provoking people into such techno-wars?

This explains your in-depth knowledge of what processors and their comparisons really mean.

Thank you

Assuming that a quad-core processor would perform better a dual-core, without taking into account processor speed and how the underlying Os and apps exploit the extra cores shows the same "in-depth" knowledge of processors.

Anandtech did a writeup on the iphone 5 performance and on the sunspider test it outperforms the galaxy 3. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6309/iphone-5a6-sunspider-perf...

However I didn't really look at the other tests.

The ipad mini though will probably be slow. It has a chip introduced in march 2011, and back then it wasn't even the fastest chip on the market. It'll be pretty much as slow as the iphone 4s.

Please people, let's not turn HN into MacRumors forums (shudder)

Advertising is intended to create the perception of differentiation. The bar for accuracy is pretty low, not quite caveat emptor but very nearly so. Tablets have become a commodity, and Amazon is no more disingenuous than a one would find in a campaign where two brands of mid-sized sedans are compared.

It is certainly no less truthful than claims that a device is "magical," nor more disingenuous than comparisons between "Macs and PC's".

The original post's moral outrage simply is not justified to the degree it purports to be unbiased because it is structured as a point by point refutation. It justifies the thesis (of disingenuousness) rather than concluding it to be the case after thoughtful analysis.

And just FYI, they never said iPhone 4, 4S or 5 were the fastest "phones", they said they're the "fastest iPhones yet", which is 100% true!

Also, Apple claims it's the fastest _iPhone_ ever. I haven't seen any claim from them that it's the fastest phone ever.

It's unfortunate you think this to be a counterargument.

I see none of the incivility that you saw in the parent comment.

>if I were to counter you, I would then say the entire of Apple's presentations and Marketing is just plain BS.

Countering somewhat negative observations about one company != attacking that company's rival. This isn't football.

Consumer chauvinism is weird.

You are reading way too deeply into this. Unless you have some research to back up your assertion that people frequently misread "for" as "or", it's hard to believe.

5. Because the iPad Mini has a bigger screen in the same overall form factor, they make the same point a different way ("30% more pixels than the Mini" => "216 pixels per inch"). If the Kindle had a bigger screen but lower PPI they'd put the screen size in here.

To be fair, Apple started the density wars. Nobody knew what the acronym PPI meant until Apple started calling it a "Retina" display. It's strange that they can't continue to compete in this category, especially given the high price of their device.

7. The screen of the Kindle Fire is odd looking. The iPad Mini behind it is on its default home screen. I'm guessing that the Kindle Fire has deliberately been shown all in black (with the bg the same colour as the bezel) because it makes it unclear where the bezel ends and the screen begins. (I don't know if this is the default setting of the Kindle Fire HD or not).

The bezel and the UI are different colors, the bezel is shiny while the UI is pure black at the top and has a silverish-black gradient behind the content. I have no trouble seeing where the (large!) bezel ends and the screen begins.

8. Ultra-fast MIMO Wi-Fi vs. A BLANK SPACE. Not even trashing the fact that there is Wifi in the iPad but it's not as fast. It looks like they just gave up at this point.

What kind of Wi-Fi does the iPad have? If not MIMO, this seems to be a valid comparison point. (I would have preferred something more meaningful, like "3x3" or "450Mbps 802.11n", but I have an idea about what they mean.)

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/new-ipad-3-1...

Given that Amazon posted a net loss this past quarter in part due to manufacturing expenses, I wouldn't call their strategy "effectively competing".

"They are very effectively competing in the market for tablets." Yep, it doesn't take a genius to sell anything at loss.

Apple plainly chose the iPad mini's resolution to ease app compatibility. That this leaves it with a lower-density display is an uncomfortable fact. How much it'll matter to the regular customer, I don't know.

I would have just moved on rather than drawing attention to this fact, but Apple instead chose to return to physical screen size. Personally, I've always valued other aspects of displays more, but they made their call.

Did you notice how Phil Schiller showed the iMac on Stage? He always talked about how thin it is and how incredible but he never showed the thicker part of the iMac.

Also noticed that Apple ALWAYS showed every iMac from the side on there website? Since the new iMac, there is only a 20° angle to the iMac, so you can only see the thin border, but not the thicker part behind it.

Oh, btw: have fun with your iPad mini.

> Don't tell us about "false marketing" on amazons side.

Why not? I thought it was interesting.

> Did you notice how Phil Schiller showed the iMac on Stage?

Yep! I didn't think it was especially relevant in the discussion thread for a story about Amazon marketing the Kindle Fire, though...

> He always talked about how thin it is and how incredible but he never showed the thicker part of the iMac.

He did, but not for very long.

> Also noticed that Apple ALWAYS showed every iMac from the side on there website? Since the new iMac, there is only a 20° angle to the iMac, so you can only see the thin border, but not the thicker part behind it.

That is weird.

> Oh, btw: have fun with your iPad mini.

No plans to buy one.

I've looked at the previous lines, but I was surprised (and entirely lost interest in the product when it was clear they weren't willing to present it honestly) when this gallery was so misleadingly shot.

Steve Would Never Have Let It Happen®.

Seriously, their main selling point is "it's so thin" and they won't even show us how thin it is? That's not clever marketing, that's idiotic.

Obviously, this is a small part of the overall desktop market, but it is the bit that Apple is interested in.

He did turn it full sideways to the camera and revealed its bulging back. You can't show off its full thickness any more than that.

It wasn't on screen that way for as long as the "ooo!" moment of the brightly lit knife edge, but it was there for all to see.

Unrelated random thoughts on iMac thickness:

It is really just an aesthetic. The foot print of the machine can't be thin because it would be too easy to knock it over backwards. You can't stick it to a wall because there would be no place for your legs. That leaves aesthetics.

Consider the angles from which you see an iMac. Generally you are mostly in front. As you move off axis beyond the screen perimeter, the edges become visible. These are indeed thin, and deliberately visible in their glorious thinness. If your desk is against a wall you will never see the bulge. If you are in an office with the desk facing the door (always my preference) the bulge is not readily apparent to people entering because of its gradual edges, it is only from about a 30 degree angle of view around the rear sides that you can really see it, and that is the region where you are walking around your desk to sit down, not one visitors inhabit.

You end up with a computer that looks thin. Does it really matter if it isn't?

Ok, got the keynote downloaded. My memory is off. He doesn't pause at exactly a side view. He passes through it twice, and the split screen shows the bulge pretty well, when they are showing the side, but obviously a viewer's attention could be on the other half of the split.

To my additional surprise, the first glory shot of the thin edge does show about half of the bulge. He could easily have stopped a few degrees sooner and shown no bulge. I wonder if that gives the viewer the belief that the bulge is much smaller than it is. That may be reading too much in.

It's just a little detail in opinion, but it shows how staged all those presentations are and you can't blame amazon for doing the same.

I hail from a place where the worth of 200$ or 300$ for a tablet cannot be justified, where we demand true value for money. So I guess I can look at these without any bias.

I am quite confident that Apple's iPad mini will have better resolution (more pixels, to be clear) in its next version. And you will find yourself saying "yes, more pixels is better".

Perhaps, Amazon is not the greatest competitor that Apple will face. Perhaps, it would be Samsung or Google. Amazon's products will not match Apple's perceived quality. Yet, these things do not change the fact that Amazon's price point would drive down the profitability of Apple products. And that, Amazon's price point will look attractive to certain segment of people (at least those like me, who believe in value for money).

It's not really a first gen product. It's an iPad with the same aspect ratio, but a smaller screen.

No, you just have a different bias.

If a $100 difference in price is a lot to you but it's not a lot to me, then your definition of value and mine are likely to be very different.

Value for money is tied into a whole load of things including how hard I had to work to get that money, what else that money might be spent on, what the improvement you get for that money is worth and so on.

These things are all relative - when it comes to matters of opinion, it's best not to claim no bias, it's easier just to state your positions and assumptions and let others factor them in.

It says things that are strictly true and presents the Fire in the best possible light, while leaving off anything that might balance out the comparison.

There's probably some weird parallel to Hacker News called Copywriting News where they're praising the people who created this promo.

I want Copy News so much now :(

The iPad Mini has a bigger screen, and is lighter than the Nexus 7 or Fire HD by a fair margin.

The press seems to be all about resolution and techie specs, but I just sold my iPad2 (to upgrade to a 4th gen), and a shrunk down iPad2, at half the weight, lighter than the competition by a decent margin seems like a slam dunk to me.

I guess time will tell, but if the primary use is as a reader, then the device with the biggest screen and the lightest weight seems like the obvious winner unless there's something horribly wrong with it. And there's certainly nothing horribly wrong with an iPad2.

People know Apple, they know how it will perform, they know it will run the Apps their friends talk about, they know the Apple stores are there if they need service, etc.

The iPad Mini, instead of being a bold play to kill the 7" tablet competitors is (unsurprisingly, perhaps) merely a smaller iPad. Maybe a somewhat cheaper iPad, but not an appreciably cheaper tablet at it's size.

And instead of shooting to further lower the price as advances roll down, it will almost certainly remain a smaller iPad, rather than a cheaper tablet; picking up the "retina" display and increasingly faster internals, rather than further cutting price. [1]

[1] Except maybe that odd $29 'bulge'. Apple doesn't seem to keep those around. e.g. IIRC the last-gen iPod Touch rocked a $229 price on entry, but as soon as they could they knocked it down to $199 and intro'd the new model at $299.

No-one really seemed interested in Android tablets regardless, until Amazon dipped their toes in with a tablet that didn't make a strong 'keep your apps' case [1]. Google got some recent interest with a tablet offering potential cross-device support that's relevant to many more people, but absent sales figures it'd be a stretch to project either of those as evidence of an android halo.

Particularly given Android's particularly strong penetration overseas and Amazon/Google's notably US-centric introductions.

Beyond that, you're assuming Android users have lots of paid apps and notable numbers of those paid apps have tablet versions or still make sense on a tablet [2]. I'm pretty certain most Android users don't have such large libraries of paid apps that they'd present any meaningful consideration when choosing a tablet.

Particularly these days when every app outside of games and multimedia editing apps is just a front end to a web service that offers both iOS and Android clients.

[1] An offering where you could probably get some existing android apps to run, but not through methods non-tinkers are likely to suffer. (Installing a second store? Sideloading?)

[2] e.g. if we're still talking kindle fire/nexus 7, there's no cell data. GPS info is limited compared to a phone. Camera apps may not be worth it with lesser sensors. etc.

Even on iOS I would be surprised if many people used the exact same apps on their phone and their tablet. Aside from some 'universal' games -- things tend to make sense or not largely based on form factor. And the outliers people do use on both, anecdotally at least, are overwhelmingly 'consuming web service' types of apps. (instapaper, facebook, etc)

Most of the iPhone users I know are at least reasonably passionate about their platform, are keen on tech (and therefore more likely to want a tablet) and have usually invested fairly heavily in apps.

Android users that I know are mostly split into two camps - the high-tech users who made a very conscious decision to go to Android, usually out a desire to be able to customise/have more control of their device. These people are again quite likely to be in the market for tablets, and have probably invested in their apps (although there seem to be more free ad-supported apps on Android, so the actual cash investment may not always be as high).

But there's another, and again purely from personal experience, much wider group of Android users. Those who got it cheap/free on their latest contract upgrade, who aren't that passionate at all about either tech or their platform, who have probably not downloaded many, or even any, apps on there. Much of my family, and many of my low-tech friends, are in this camp - they are Android users, but hardly aware of the fact.

Whether you believe this or not, this is what Apple are telling consumers about app reuse on Android vs iOS.

These are the marketing tactics and do you thing Apple have never done this before?

You need to calibrate your monitor. The screen shown on the Fire is dark grey, but not black. I can clearly see where the screen ends on the top, right, and left. The bottom is a subtle gradient to black, though.

I guess they actually mean you can get much more benefits for much less money

However it's interesting because Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, and they're using their advantage in that area to push their products, now that they make products.

Seems like a poor path to go down if you want manufacturers to keep selling products through your store.

Not even likely. "Much less" is only about money: $199 vs $329

> SD vs HD, is dependent upon who you ask. The CEA, which represents the TV makers, says that anything with at least 720 lines is HDTV, thus enabling 1024x768 to be called HDTV. ATSC, which develops broadcast standards, says that HDTV should be 720 or 1080 lines at 16:9 aspect ratio, which implies 1280x720 or 1920x1080.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710875

But this post is a wonderful example of the sort of doubt Amazon will be very happy to have spread as a result of the ads.

The last time I looked at buying a movie in iTunes, the max resolution they sold was 720P.

iPad mini has 768 pixels, but the display is 4:3. It will not display 720 lines without distorting the video. Or cropping. To play 16:9, it will be displayed as 1024x576 with black bars at top and bottom. 576 happens to be SD PAL.

At the time it beat the iPad 3 but I don't know if the mini changes that.

In real world applications I think the real benefit is increased range. In an office setting, I could definitely see that being useful.