WinSuperSite’s Paul Thurott Reviews Retina iPad mini
I’m always interested in reading Paul Thurott’s take on Apple products. His site’s theme is Windows-centric, but that gives him a different perspective than Apple-oriented reviewers, and he’s an honest, even-handed critic.
In his iPad mini with Retina Display Review, he pronounces the hot-selling Retina mini as “near perfection, but at a too-dear price,” maintaining that were cost no object, he’d tell you to buy an iPad mini with Retina Display and call it a day, enjoying the “gorgeous 4:3 better-than-HD screen that really works well in the mini-tablet form factor and is backed by the superior apps and digital media ecosystems.” However, he observes that cost is a daily reality, and Apple’s too-high pricing puts the Retina mini out of contention for most.
Thurott praises the mini’s build quality as typically for Apple devices – superb, especially when examined next to virtually any other device, and its performance is amazing across the board, as are battery life and screen quality. Hr likes iOS 7 just fine and says that coupled with the biggest and best app store and content store of any mobile platform, you’ve got a winner.
But he says the iPad mini with Retina display’s Achilles Heel is price, starting at at $399 for a bare bones model and going up to $829 fully optioned-out. Comparitively, a 16 GB/Wi-Fi version of the Google Nexus 7 is $229, and a 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire HDX (with ads removed) is $244.
The iPad mini isn’t just “expensive,” he says, “it’s expensive past the point of absurdity,” and while he’s willing to give Apple a price premium, in this price range, $100 more than the competition is extortion, and while Apple’s devices are generally excellent, we’re at the point now with Android devices in particular, where the tradeoffs you need to make to “settle” for such a device aren’t painful in the slightest, making machines like Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX much, much better values than any iPad.
For the full review visit here:
http://goo.gl/Fafj9k
