Seeing as they were already setting the bar for tablets they could afford to make it thicker that they needed to. In all likelihood it was more of an economic consideration, larger components being cheaper, but knowing they had the ability to make it thinner and lighter later would have been part of the medium term plans.
Competitors’ tablets aren’t any thinner. That’s what you would expect if Apple had made the first iPad purposefully thicker than they could have done.
They probably didn’t spend much time optimizing the thickness the first time around. I would guess that they made a ton of dummy mockups, figured out some sort of maximum thickness to still get a compelling product and designed the first iPad with that goal in mind.
Could they have released a thinner iPad last year? Probably, but it might well have taken them a few months longer. It’s simply a matter of priorities. You can’t do everything.
I don’t for one second believe that they already had the design for a thinner iPad drawn up and added some thickness in the last minute just to make their job easier.
Actually, at very high volumes (where the non-recurring engineering cost is sufficiently amortized), the larger equivalent component is more expensive, since you are using more material to manufacture the component.
Obviously, other factors, like process yield can be a factor here as well, since a lower process yield for the smaller component would increase its price.
I knew a guy that used to apply this principle to coding. He'd put a bunch of while loops counting from one to a gazillion that could be removed at a later time during "optimization".
Well, the camera was left out of the first version for that reason (presumably). Remember the slot left in the back of the bezel that took a standard iPod sized camera module?
