The Apple rumor-mill went into overdrive this week, with renewed reports that the company has started production of a 12.9-inch iPad, the so-called iPad Pro.
We've been hearing reports of a larger iPad almost as long as we've heard rumors of a larger iPhone, which is to say, years.
See also: iPad Air or Retina iPad Mini: Which New iPad Is for You?
The latest rumor comes from The Korea Times, citing a so-called "official at a local Apple supplier in Korea," the paper says Apple is going to reveal a 12.9-inch iPad in early 2014. The rationale for the bigger tablet? Apparently Apple is going to have to play catch-up with LG and Samsung, who are selling larger tablets.
This story follows a supply chain research report conducted by NPD DisplaySearch in October and an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal back in July.
I'm not going to say that Apple will never release a larger iPad (I made that mistake by defusing early notions of an iPad mini), but the most recent reports make absolutely no logical sense.
The first red-herring with the rumor of a 12.9-inch iPad is that the reports claim that Apple will release the product in early 2014.
That would be more plausible if Apple still released new iPad devices in March. Since 2012, however, Apple has shifted the iPad release cycle to October.
For better or worse, iOS devices have maintained a yearly release cycle. There are occasional anomalies (the 16-month gap between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S and the brief life of the iPad 3), but like the iPod devices before it, iOS devices comes out once a year, more or less on schedule.
If a bigger iPad is on the way, it would make very little sense for the company to announce it less than six months after releasing the wholly redesigned iPad Air and the new iPad mini with Retina display.
Aside from the release anomaly, what makes me extremely suspicious of the "bigger iPad" rumors is that Apple is purportedly doing this to compete against bigger tablets from other manufacturers.
Would someone please let me know where these 13-inch tablets are? Because I can't find any that are actually selling.
If anything, the big trend with tablets is to get smaller — not bigger. No one except for Apple and Samsung are even actively in the 10-inch space (the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 can probably be in that space too). Instead, 7- and 8-inch tablets are the rage.
Toshiba sold the Excite 13 running Android back in 2012, but it sold about as well as any other Toshiba tablet (which is to say, not at all) and there are a few 13-inch Android tablets from various Chinese manufacturers — and that's about it.
Plus, everyone who has tried to sell bigger tablets has failed and failed hard. Remember the JooJoo? Yeah, didn't think so.
Remember the Kno, the so-called "education tablet" available in single or dual 14.1-inch displays? Kno managed to raise nearly $75 million for its idea of the world's most gigantic textbook, only to sell for $15 million to Intel (one of its investors) earlier in November.
Sure, there is a market (of sorts) for hybrid and convertible devices — think the HP Split x2 and the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro — but those devices almost universally run Windows and are what I would classify as an Ultrabook with a touch screen, not a tablet like the iPad, Galaxy Note 10.1 or Kindle Fire HDX.
Some of the rumors of a larger iPad seem to imply that Apple will make the device more like a MacBook Air — that is, it will run OS X. Before the launch of Windows 8, lots of pundits predicted that Apple would have to add touch support to OS X, you know, to keep up.
Even then, Apple was resolute that OS X was designed for a mouse and keyboard. The company has introduced a bunch of multi-touch gestures to its trackpad but the company has expressed absolutely no interest in putting a touch sensor on the screen.
After Windows 8 launched with a thud, Apple's decision to keep OS X and iOS separate seems to make even more sense.
I don't doubt that at some point we'll see some sort of unification between iOS and OS X — but that day is not today. Or even this year.
In fact, if Apple is to bring a touch experience to its Mac line, I expect it will do it in a manner that is similar to a patent the company filed in 2010. The idea would be to have one interface and resolution when in one orientation and to switch seamlessly to a tablet (and tablet OS) when in another.
There is a certain class of users who would pay good money for a true MacBook tablet. In fact, users have been clamoring for that exact device for longer than I've been a professional writer. Sorry folks, Apple makes most of its products for regular users — not the fringe.
If you want a 4K touch screen for Photoshop or video editing, you should just get something from Wacom, such as the Cintiq 13HD or the Cintiq 22HD Touch.
I have no doubt that Apple has continued to play with screens at a myriad of different sizes for its phones and tablets. Before the original iPad was released, Apple ordered screens in many different sizes and even did small production runs of certain sizes in order to test what was correct.
This isn't unique to just Apple, of course. Variation in size and iterative adjustments are part of the industrial design process.
Apple has thousands of suppliers and sub-suppliers for its major components. Many of those suppliers and factories are now the source of many Apple leaks. Most of the time, those leaks prove to be bogus.
In fact, the only leaks that have had a history of being repeatedly accurate are from housing makers. We've seen early images of the housing of the iPad 2, iPad mini and iPad Air appear online weeks — sometimes months — ahead of full release. Even then, I can't ever recall a manufacturing source correctly predicting a product's actual release date (assuming it was a release date that was atypical).
Even if Apple does release a 13-inch iPad at some point in the future, that won't necessarily mean that these rumors were correct. There were plenty of rumors of a 7-inch iPad, many that appeared years before the announcement of the iPad mini. Those 2010 and 2011 7-inch iPad rumors had no more validity, even though Apple did eventually release a smaller tablet.
It's sort of like the original Apple tablet rumors (which go back at least as far as 2004 or 2005), just because someone reported that Apple was working on a tablet in 2005 doesn't mean that report was vindicated once the iPad came out in 2010. It's possible that the initial story was well-placed and true, but it's much more likely that it was just a coincidence. A broken clock is still right twice a day, after all.
If Apple does release a 13-inch iPad in early 2014, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong. I'l even do it publicly at Mashable. Something tells me, however, that it won't happen. Not now.
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