On the latest episode of The Talk Show hosted by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and Dan Benjamin, Gruber made several comments related to Apple’s long-rumored 7-inch iPad. When asked whether Apple will release a 7-inch iPad—at roughly the 1:17:50 mark—Gruber said he didn’t know, but did say that he knows “they have one in the lab… a 7.85-inch iPad that runs at 1024 x 768, and it’s just like the 9.7-inch iPad shrunk down a little bit”.
He continues, “apps wouldn’t need to be recompiled or redesigned to work optimally on it, it’s just that the iPad is smaller”.
Gruber suggested that a good way to approximate the interface is to take a screenshot on a 9.7-inch iPad in portrait mode, and then view that screenshot in landscape mode, and went on to say that the height of such a device would be very close to the width of the current model.
“It’s usable,” he said, adding that “there are a couple of areas where I think the text is a little too small, but it’s not ridiculously small”. Finally, he said that he’d heard these details from numerous people, but had not heard that it was anything they are definitely going to ship, and said he felt the device was more of a “maybe”.
