I’m spending this week vacationing with my parents, siblings, and their families this week, and although a few MacBooks made the journey, and all the adults have iPhones, there are more tablets than people if you count the e-ink devices.
It turns out that other than people 5’6″ and under who aren’t nerds prefer the 10″ iPads for just about everything. The 10″ form factor is already “tweener” device for them: neither a phone nor 13″ MacBook.
When my parents use an iPhone to look up something, my dad takes his glasses off, my mother puts her non-prescription glasses on, and both hold it some “perfect” distance from their face. If Apple were to release a larger iPhone, their hope is that it’ll have the same number of points on screen as existing models.
This is not the case with the iPads, which they mostly use while in a reclined chair. The 10″ size seems to be a sweet spot for being able to see the iPad, then being able to see the TV or something else further away without having to switch anything or wait particularly long for their eyes to adjust.
Tablet devices get full websites; making the type of browsing to the types of websites that don’t get updating to responsive designs (or worse – those weird iPhone OS 1 type websites) a breeze.