Here’s a quick tour of the hardware including that 4.3 million pixel display. We have a 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina Display in the house and to my eyes, the screen of the Chromebook Pixel looks even better although that’s hard to translate in a video. The internal speakers are outstanding as well as I tried to demonstrate on camera. Unfortunately, my video camera is “smart” enough to level out the sound, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Outside of the occasional podcast and video production, I have little doubt the Pixel could fulfill all of my mobile computing needs. And it would be a joy to use one of them as well thanks to the Intel Core i5 chip and 4 GB of memory; bench-marking Chrome shows a four- to five-fold performance boost over the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook I bought last year.

It’s even slightly faster than Chrome on my similarly spec’d MacBook Air. And unlike most other Chromebooks, no corners were cut: The Pixel’s design and build quality is top notch from the backlit keyboard to piano hinge that doubles as a heat sink.

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Ok, so I really didn’t have that conversation with my iPad 3. At least not out loud! But it is true: The new iPad mini is replacing my iPad 3; lack of Retina display, be damned! Before I share more thoughts on the two tablets and what led me to the decision, let me bring back some salient points I made nearly two years ago on Apple missing out on the small tablet market. That post, along with the great reader commentary, was read by Apple executives who then decided to enter the small tablet market.

What’s the big deal about small tablets?

Here’s my summary from back then when describing the experience with my 7-inch Galaxy Tab:

“I’m not suggesting everyone dump their iPads; I’m simply explaining my own decision making process to help you make your own. And aside from our own Darrell Etherington at the GigaOM Apple channel who tried, and then returned a Tab, I’ve heard from at least a dozen Tab owners who are also finding less use for the iPad (and other devices) based on the 7-inch form factor. Darrell’s experience with the Tab ironically made him realize that he wants a 7-inch iPad. I’m inclined to agree and would consider dumping my Tab if Apple were to sell such a device. It would be the best of both worlds, regardless of Steve Jobs’s insinuation that it will never happen.

Darrell’s sentiment highlights a key point I’m trying to make here: We often look at the features of a device, but I contend that form is just as much a feature as the CPU clock cycle or the amount of memory in a mobile device. Of course, you never know that until you try a new form factor to see how it fits in your lifestyle. I’m glad I did that with the Tab.”

Perhaps the most important point here is that without the experience of using a small slate, it’s easy to miss its biggest benefit: portability.

But it doesn’t have a Retina Display!

Dooming the device without experience is of using it has already been seen: iPad mini naysayers were decrying the device for its 1024 x 768 display before the device even shipped. I can’t argue with them that the Retina display on the recent iPads are outstanding. But the screen on the iPad mini isn’t as bad as the ones found on the first two iPads.

“Wait, aren’t those all 1024 x 768 resolution? How can the iPad mini screen be better than the first two iPads?” I’m glad you asked, and it’s a pretty simple answer really. Because the same 786,432 pixels of a display with this resolution are crammed into a smaller screen, the pixel density is greater. That means, all things being equal, things on the screen will look clearer. Not by much, but enough to see a difference. So no, the iPad mini display can’t compete with the screen on the newest iPads, but it’s better than the iPads from two or three years ago.

Just as I said when I dumped the first iPad in favor of a 7-inch tablet, I don’t expect everyone to follow suit. After all, thanks to a myriad of applications, the iPad is used differently by everyone. For example, I actually don’t create much content on an iPad, outside of emails and social network updates, that is. If I actually used my iPad to write my daily blog posts, I might feel differently as I find that activity better on a screen larger than 7 or 7.9 inches.

Instead, I do far more content consumption: ebook reading; web browsing; watching TED videos, television episodes and movies; using various apps and games. All of these activities fit nicely on the iPad mini and I’m already doing them in more places: my “large” iPads always tended to stay at home, but the iPad mini can easily go anywhere. And as I noted in early 2011, the best tablet is the one you have with you.

A full iPad experience in a smaller package is a huge selling point

As far as the iPad mini’s usage, performance and feature set, I feel like I’m getting the full iPad experience in a package more suited to my particular needs. Based on a visit to the local Apple Store in King of Prussia, Penn. over the weekend, I suspect many others are starting to see the light. I watched person after person enter the store and walk up to the iPad mini display units with a quizzical look on their face, as if to say, “What’s the point of this smaller iPad?”

More often than not, those looks melted away after a few minutes and it was as if I could actually see the light bulbs going off over people’s heads. Between the portability, the lower price and the full iPad experience, I suspect Apple will sell more iPad mini tablets this holiday season than any other iPad model.

So, goodbye, iPad 3. You were great; whenever I had you around, that is. The problem is a slimmer, lighter model provides the same utility in more places for me; even with that lowly 1024 x 768 display.

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The New York Times‘ David Pogue

iPad Mini is a far classier, more attractive, thinner machine. It has two cameras instead of one. Its fit and finish are far more refined. And above all, it offers that colossal app catalog, which Android tablet owners can only dream about.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

It’s really light and easy to hold one-handed. But it’s disappointing to go non-retina after using the retina iPad for the last seven months….My ideal iPad would be a Mini with a retina display.

USA Today‘s Ed Baig

Sitting in a cramped airline seat, or lying in bed, I found reading on the Mini to be a generally a more pleasurable experience than reading on the full-size iPad. But though you can now more easily hold a Mini with one hand, I still tended to use two.

Jim Dalrymple

In addition to using the iPad mini in my normal daily tasks, I also found that I would pick up the mini and use it where I normally wouldn’t use the iPad. For instance, if I’m on a phone call, I would typically use my iPhone to look things up while I walk around or type notes, look at Web sites and things like that. Now, I’m using the iPad mini because it’s compact enough to carry around, but not so large that it’s cumbersome.

CNET’s Scott Stein 

If you want the full, polished Apple tablet experience in a smaller package, the iPad Mini is worth the premium price. Otherwise, good alternatives are available for less money.

For whatever it’s worth, I played with one at the launch event last week and wasn’t entirely convinced that I needed to take a step back from the iPad 3 with Retina display — which goes wherever I go.

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The new MacBook Pro has 4.96 million pixels, and will ship beginning Tuesday starting at $1699 with 128GB flash, 8GB RAM, 2.5 Ghz dual-core i5 processor. This makes the 13-inch about $500 less than the 15-inch, which was started at $2,199 to start for the base model. The company says it will have 75 percent less reflection and 28 percent higher contrast than the current generation.

Apple’s Phil Schiller said the new edition will come with a FaceTime HD camera, dual microphones, a backlit keyboard, and up to seven hours of battery life. It also comes with two Thunderbolt and two USB 3.0 ports, as well as a new HDMI port. Schiller emphasized the advantages of the Retina display, noting how attractively it will display photos and applications:

“Searching the web can be like a fine print magazine,” he said.

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Production of the new display, as reported by Unwired View, is specifically slated for smartphones, although the definition of what’s a phone and what’s a tablet is showing some overlap. Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 2, for example, uses a 5.5-inch display at 1280 x 720 resolution, and has tablet features along with the traditional voice calling of a smartphone.

This move towards larger touchscreen displays isn’t new, however. I started to see the trend develop in early 2010 as smartphones began creeping closer to 4 inches in size. The following year, such a size was viewed as nearly standard even as phones with 5-inch or larger displays hit the market. Add in the growing market for 7-inch tablets and we may see some “meeting in the middle” in terms of screen size for portable handsets and small tablets.

Much of this trend towards bigger is, in my opinion, because of the growing demand for mobile device video content and richer applications that can benefit from larger displays. And 720p displays won’t quite cut it for optimal clarity once screens grow in size to a certain point. With more than twice as many pixels as a 720p screen, full HD displays on smartphones and small tablets will enhance the mobile experience. One only need to look at Apple’s newest iPad with 2048 x 1536 resolution compared to the prior models to see the difference.

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As native applications on the Mac transition to a brighter, sharper world, some applications will appear to be a bit fuzzy around the edges when viewed on a Retina display.  Here are some things to look for in the new age of Retina Mac.

Finding applications that support Retina displays

While Adobe has vowed support of Apple’s new Retina display standard from the beginning, other developers like Microsoft have not been nearly as forthcoming.  When it come to supporting the Retina display, Apple’s own Mail, Safari, iCal, Address Book, iChat, FaceTime, Photo Booth and TextEdit fit the bill. Additionally, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Aperture, Final Cut Pro X, and Motion all support the Retina display.

Some of my favorite non-Apple apps like Byword, MacJournal, MarsEdit, Pixelmator, SpellTower, MacJournal, 1Password, Day One, Evernote, Google Chrome, Parallels, Reeder and TextExpander all support the Retina display now as well. There are some websites like retinamacapps.com that are keeping track of which apps have been updated, and other sites that list apps they hope will be updated soon.  Many app developers are indicating support for the Retina display in their release notes under “what’s new.”

Unfortunately there is no easy way to tell which applications that you already have installed on your Mac do have Retina support.  One thing you can do is check out each application’s information by right clicking on the application icon in the Applications Folder, and selecting Get Info.  Here you will see a new setting titled, “Open in Low Resolution.”  While this is not an indication of whether or not the developer has updated the application, you can see if the application is being forced to run in low-resolution mode.  If you are experiencing difficulties with a particular application, or just want to see if you can improve things a bit, you may want to try to adjust this setting manually.

Scaling your Mac’s screen in the meantime

One thing you do not get with the new Retina displays is more screen real estate.  In fact, because of the added pixel density, it may just appear that you are dealing with less screen real estate than you are used to on other non-Retina display screens like the Apple 27-inch LED display.  With the new MacBook Pros that have Retina Displays, there is a new way of configuring your screen’s resolution.

You can either make the text on the screen appear larger, or give your applications more space by making everything a little bit smaller.  Changing this particular setting for all applications sort of defeats the purpose of purchasing the Retina display in the first place.  But if you bought the new Macbook Pro with Retina display for other reasons, like its slim design, or if you can’t stand some apps looking great and other apps looking a bit fuzzy, then you may want to try to adjust the resolution to a setting more to your liking.

What developers are doing about Retina displays

What developers are faced with when it comes to Apple’s new Retina displays, in most cases, is not so much a difficult task as it is a tedious task.  Going back and re-cutting all of your graphics to accommodate a new resolution is more time-consuming for applications that have a lot of graphical content to display.  This goes beyond simply resizing images.  As an example, shadows and borders can become over emphasized on the Retina display.  Fixing this would require some fine tuning of image resources beyond what simply scaling an image can provide.

Apple has put tougher some guidelines for developers that are looking to update their apps to support Retina displays.  But for the most part, it the subjective task of looking over every graphic in your application to ensure that is looks the way you want it to look on both the Retina and standard displays can be a lot of exacting work.  For many, this means adjusting project timelines to accommodate the update to support the Retina display.

On the positive side, apps that do update quickly will be included in various lists like this one, before supporting Retina display becomes more routine.

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• The judge in the Apple-Samsung trial has made it clear in the past few weeks that she is annoyed with the courtroom theatrics from both sides. Today she strongly suggested, even after more than two weeks of testimony, that the two settle before a jury gets to decide, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
• Because of internal numbers released during the Apple-Samsung trial, we know that IDC’s tablet sales numbers are at the very least highly questionable. Fortune today points out the same problem with Gartner’s smartphone numbers: they can’t be as accurate as the analyst firm is claiming.
• Business Insider has a Q&A with the creator of Quake Labs, a company founded by a bunch of original members of Apple’s iPhone team, which is looking to create an easier way for people to create content directly on a phone or tablet.
• Microsoft says Office for Mac is compatible with OS X Mountain Lion, but it still hasn’t updated the entire software suite to be compatible with Apple’s biggest new Mac product this year: the MacBook Pro with Retina display. As Macworld reports, Microsoft doesn’t plan on it for some time, either.
• CNET reminds us why Apple is targeting Android device makers instead of Google, maker of Android, over alleged iPhone and iPad patent violations.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ereneta

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• Fortune looks at how the rise of Apple’s Retina display technology has ratcheted up general expectations for all of our touchscreen devices today and wonders whether or not we really need such high-definition displays on all of our gadgets.
• Is Apple going too far in its crackdown on app marketers? VentureBeat talks to gaming companies who say they’re not confident that Apple is handling the policing of its App Store as well as it could.
• You win some, you lose some: Apple was unsuccessful in convincing the International Trade Commission to stop the HTC One X And HTC Evo 4G smartphones from crossing the U.S. border, Bloomberg reports.
• Apple was forced to pay $60 million in a dispute over the iPad trademark in China. And now a household chemical company in the country is taking its turn, reports Kotaku. Jiangsu Xuebao is suing Apple over “Snow Leopard” claiming it owns the trademark for its own product — though it’s unclear how a cleaning product and a desktop OS of the same name could legitimately be confused by anyone.
• I reviewed it last fall when it arrived in theaters, but the Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview has just hit the iTunes Store for the first time. It’s a glimpse of Jobs during his NeXT years, before he’d make his return to Apple. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t seen it.

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Apple made a gross margin of $18.5 billion just in the last quarter. If you peel back the layers and look at how its different product lines contribute to this margin, you will find its MacBook lines account for $1.65 billion.

Apple’s profit from MacBook lines declined from 2011 to 2012, and the average selling price (ASP) of MacBook line dropped by $40.

It may not sound like much, but at 47 percent unit margin, that number meant $52 million in forgone profit. All because their product mix changed from selling higher priced MacBook Pros to lower priced MacBook Airs and 13-inch MacBook Pros.

That is about to change with its new product refresh, especially with the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Let us do some math.

What can we say from distribution of sales between the different MacBook versions from the $1,245 ASP numbers? For simplicity, let us treat the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro as one category with an ASP of $1099, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro as another category with an ASP of $1799. Solving for these numbers tells us that the 15-inch MacBook Pro accounted for less than 23 percent of MacBook units sold. In other words, three in four MacBooks sold are either MacBook Airs or the 13-inch version.

Shifting more of the sales to the higher priced MacBook Pro is one clear way to increase profits. Enter the new 15-inch MacBook Pro with its $2,199 price tag and two compelling value propositions — 256GB SSD (solid-state drive) and Retina Display.

For $400 more, customers get both 256GB SSD and Retina Display. And if anyone should insist on getting just SSD, they can pay $500 more instead of $400 more. That is the decoy option put in place just to make the 15-inch retina display far more attractive than it would have been by itself.

By design, the Retina Display is not available in the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. This way, those who want the insanely-high screen resolution will have to pay up at least $2,199 to get it.

This clever price discrimination will result in two positive effects on the units sold. One, some who would have settled for a MacBook Air or the 13-inch MacBook Pro will upgrade to the $2,199 MacBook Pro. Two, it will push some who preferred the 15-inch MacBook Pro to the $2,199 version with Retina Display. The net result is a higher ASP than the current $1,245 number. Even if one in ten customers of first category and one in five in the second category upgrade to Retina Display, Apple will see the MacBook ASP go up to $1,363.

If Apple sees no change in total number of units sold from the current quarter, this ASP bump will still result in a minimum additional profit of $200 million. If you include net new purchases and higher percentage up-sells, this number could easily become $1 billion in additional profit.

That is one amazing and magical product.

Rags Srinivasan is a management professional who specializes in product strategy and strategic marketing. He is currently working on big data products. He blogs at Iterative Path and tweets at @rags.

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• It seems clear that Apple is about to refresh its Mac lineup, which was last updated in July 2011. The latest rumor, from an analyst who spoke with AppleInsider, is that not only will the 17-inch MacBook Pro be dropped, but that Apple will resurrect the MacBook name — after killing it off last summer — for a pair of 13-inch and 15-inch laptops, with the latest Intel chipset, a Retina Display, and the choice of a solid-state or traditional hard drive. But like the MacBook Air, it will supposedly ditch the optical drive. The two new MacBooks, reportedly, will exist alongside two refreshed MacBook Airs and two new MacBook Pros.
• Plenty of whispers have indicated Retina Displays are coming to Macs. More evidence showed up in the form of an app in the Mac App Store newly labeled with “retina graphics,” as spotted by The Next Web. (Be sure to see Kevin Tofel’s thoughts on how much such an upgrade would cost.)
• T-Mobile may be the only major carrier in the U.S. that can’t offer the iPhone, but it’s going to use WWDC to test its upgraded 4G network. On Thursday the carrier confirmed to 9to5Mac that it is doing a trial run with its 4G HSPA+ service in the 1900 MHz band around San Francisco’s Moscone Center, where, “coincidentally,” iPhone-toting WWDC attendees from all over the world will be swarming starting Monday morning.
• Bloomberg Businessweek has a great profile of one of the most familiar faces of the annual WWDC event besides Steve Jobs: Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller. The piece focuses on the pressure he’s under — as holder of the company’s nearly $1 billion annual ad budget – to keep the company and its products “cool” and relevant.
• The aftermath of every Apple event is clouded by unmet expectations on the part of Apple fans and critics alike. If you want to see what the people who trade Apple stock are expecting and how they view Apple stock’s potential, take a look at Fortune’s roundup.

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