[Robo]

Originally Posted by kscherer Honestly, though, I just don't see what that thing needs. It's good enough for everyone who buys it.

That’s kind of weird logic, though. I mean, the $149 Fire 10 is good enough for the people that buy it, too. They give it good reviews! The point of Apple is to be better than “good enough,” to surprise and delight you in ways you didn’t expect. That’s why the Apple brand is so valuable and why they can charge twice as much as Amazon for their ten-inch tablet.

I’m sure the circa-2015 MacBook Air Apple was selling until this summer was “good enough” for a lot of people, too, but that doesn’t mean they should keep selling it forever with no updates. The competition gets better every year. People’s standards go up.

Originally Posted by kscherer If they bump its specs, then what makes the iPad Air so special (it's pretty hard to sort that out as it stands ).

Holding back one product to protect another is the sort of pernicious idea that, once it takes root, slowly strangles a company. Apple has always bee emphatic about avoiding this sort of thinking, about pushing each product to be the best it can be, even if that challenges the other teams to make their products more capable.

A 9.7-inch version of the current iPad Air is pretty much exactly what I’d expect the next base iPad to look like. Which is fine, because I’d expect the iPad Air to get better too.