I was in the Apple Store Exeter on Sunday morning and listening to various people deciding whether to buy an iPad Air or iPad Mini with Retina Display.

They were using the current iPads as a gauge to try and decide which new iPad to buy. If you recall the new iPads are identical in feature set and specification from cameras, screens and processors. So these potential customers asked the Apple staff for some guidance.

Now forget for one moment if you are a geek, how would you differentiate the difference? How would you sell the differences? So after showing the screen sharpness it was difficult even with the current iPad Mini to really show any major difference with the full size iPad. In fact due to the better whiteness and backlight, the Mini screen looked better. So at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was physical size of the iPad. Everything else was irrelevant to an average person. And as the physical size of the Air would be slightly smaller, this makes this task even harder. The Apple staff couldn’t really give any major reasons to pick one over the over. They just said you have a 14 day return period if you are unhappy with it.

The final decision by these average buyers was to go for the Air. The larger size screen would make viewing and typing on the screen a little easier. And that was all that counted in the end.