DaringFireball's John Gruber claims hearing from "well-informed little birdies" that the iPad will ship without some apps that were included on the iPhone.
In his blog post today, Gruber responds to a question I posed last week about iPhone apps that appear to be missing from the iPad. Apple's iPad press materials suggest the device will ship with 12 built-in apps, and noticeably missing are a few wares that came with the iPhone: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. So what exactly is going to happen to them when the iPad launches in April?
Gruber, who's accurately leaked some Apple rumors in the past, cites anonymous sources who say Steve Jobs scrapped the apps in question because they didn't look or feel right when refitted for the iPad's bigger screen.
"Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated," Gruber wrote. "It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem."
I made a quick guess last week that Apple would stick the missing iPhone apps in the App Store for a free download. Part of my reasoning was that Apple is already allowing the App Store's 140,000 third-party iPhone apps to run on the iPad, so Apple could technically do the same with its own non-tabletized iPhone apps. But Gruber's sources suggest we won't see them at all. That's believable, because it's quite Jobs-esque to choose to hold Apple's apps to a higher standard.
With that said, the missing apps won't be much of a loss, because there are plenty of third-party apps in the App Store that we can choose from as substitutes. (Personally I'm glad I won't have to see that Stocks app anymore, because I never, ever used it.) Gruber also shoots down blogger Kevin Fox's speculation that Apple would introduce a "Dashboard" mode to run these missing apps in the background. That's too bad: I thought that would've been a neat solution for multitasking.
See Also:
- Will the iPad Be Missing a Few iPhone Apps?
- Ten Things Missing From the iPad
- Hands-On With the Apple iPad
Image courtesy of Apple
