Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s marketing head defends iPad Mini’s pricing

The Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad Mini's starting price of $329 has taken everyone by surprise considering that it was expected to be a cheaper version of the regular iPad and also was supposed to compete with the Google Nexus and Amazon's Kindle Fire.

Apple's marketing chief Phil Schiller has however come to the defence of the pricing and the company's strategy in this regard.

According to Schiller, customers would be willing to pay for a quality product like the iPad Mini, the kind of quality that Google and Amazon do not offer.

"The iPad is far and away the most successful product in its category," Schiller said. "The most affordable product we've made so far was $399 and people were choosing that over those other devices.

"And now you can get a device that's even more affordable at $329 in this great new form, and I think a lot of customers are going to be very excited about that."

Both the Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire, which are much smaller than the iPad Mini at display screen sizes of 8 inches.

At the launch event on Tuesday, Schiller especially focussed on the Google Nexus 7 to illustrate his point about quality and build.

He made the case for Apple's 7.9-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which offers over a third larger display area than the 7-inch display on Google's tablet with a 16:9 aspect ratio, Apple Insider reported.

Schiller also noted that when Android controls are taken into account when browsing a website, the display area is 49 percent larger on the iPad mini in portrait mode than with the Nexus 7, and 67 percent larger in landscape mode, Apple Insider said.