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If you give me a choice between buttery smooth >60Hz refresh rate animations, and better battery life, I'll choose the battery life 100% of the time. But that's just me. But then again, with the insides of a typical tablet being 90% battery these days (along with a little motherboard along one edge) maybe that's all a nonissue. Phones, on the other hand... my unambitious, cheap (from when you could still get half decent cheap phones) one goes two days on a charge easily, whereas a friend with an "advanced" phone struggles to get through one day with it, often running out during all-day outdoor adventures. Tradeoffs!

Has any non pro consumer ever noticed a display greater than 60 hz. I can barely get the regular people in my life to nice anything above 30 hz or turning off motion smoothing. I really don't see how any of this stuff matters for most people

The base iPhone 17 has a 120 Hz display, I suspect they are going to drip feed it through their products as a cheap spec bump (vs adding extra RAM or storage).

While I agree 100%, I'm more interested in the variable refresh down to 1hz that comes with 'Promotion' to save on battery when viewing lots of static text.

The non-Pro iPhone 17 has ProMotion. I have to assume it's a matter of time before it'll make its way to the non-Pro iPads.

High refresh rate displays are an interesting feature because most users do not notice the difference.

I can spot a 60Hz display from jiggling the mouse pointer for a second.

I’ve also done side-by-side comparisons of full screen scrolling on 60Hz and 120Hz screens for less technical people who could barely perceive a difference when I was pointing it out, but it took some time to get them to see it.

MKBHD (YouTube tech video and reviewer) talks about this a lot: It’s highly valuable to people like you and me who are attuned to the performance of our devices, but most people don’t notice. Or care!

I would appreciate high Hz displays everywhere, but I admit that Apple has probably made the right consumer choice tradeoff to compromise on refresh rate for these lower end devices where minimum cost and maximum battery life are the two most important features for those who buy them.

Right? Pro devices should be 240hz now

Thanks AI.

I wanted to upgrade my air(gen4) but with these prices it's just not happening. Oh and no support for the perfectly fine apple pencil I already got with it is just....

Value/$ in iPad basically has not changed since 2022. Inflation (general and AI/antitrust-driven component shortages) has cancelled out technical gains.

128gb...

I don't think that's unique to OLED. There's all manner of things that could've gone wrong when breaking a corner in both LCD and OLED

Only Apple can properly replace these screens and pair the parts (FaceId etc), so setting the standard repair cost high enough helps push people toward Apple Care eligible new devices, handicapping the second hand market.

That has been the case basically since Apple Care existed IMHO.

> The cost to replace that screen: $1200.

That's Apple saying to you: omg, stop being so poor and wasting our time, just buy another one

That happened to my MBP without OLED. Fortunately I had Applecare.

The cheapest configuration of the original model was $329 in 2012 [0]. Even when corrected for inflation, that would still be less than $500 in today's money -- so quite a bit less than $700!

Is the comparison unfair because today's model is much more powerful than the one from 14 years ago? Perhaps. But perhaps it shouldn't be compared to the past, but to its relative competitors?

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2012/10/23Apple-Introduces-iP...

> RAM/Chip prices are way, way up

So that cloud providers can have servers and GPUs sitting unpowered in warehouses and datacenters.

How does AI explain the mini being $250 more expensive than the regular 11-inch iPad?

> The reality: RAM/Chip prices are way, way up. The starter iPad mini is $700.

This has tiny 128 GB of storage and unknown but obviously not too high amount of RAM. At best 16, but probably less.

That's just Apple beeing greedy as usual.

I thought the same thing about iPhones, then I got an iPhone Air and can’t imagine going back to those fat bloated bricks people lug around daily. Worse, they put a thick case on it making it even more portly, because the aluminum bodies dent so easily. iPhone Air is what Steve Jobs would have wanted: a super thin strong Titanium phone that doesn’t need any case to feel complete.

Nanotexture on non-folding displays is etched glass.

Gizmodo thinks it will have at least 12GB RAM, but it sounds more like an educated guess than a confirmed fact:

https://gizmodo.com/ipad-mini-oled-a20-pro-chip-2000830541#:...

The 512GB option actually has a better chip with 1 more CPU core and twice the neural engine...

One of my beloved devices was the Nexus 7, it was an excellent affordable template that didn't feel cheap, nor fancy or pro. Just a good media consumption / general purpose small tablet.

I wish Apple would make a similar device. I'm fine with recycled chips and getting a bit gimped on RAM size.

Like the MacBook Neo of iPads; I just really want a media consumption device. A20 Pro means nothing to me.

In what way are they selling it as a "pro" product?

It's the same price as a MacBook Neo

£700 here (VAT incl). That's ~$1,310 CAD!

And with a 1-nit minimum brightness, iPad mini is even more suitable for dim environments, from users reading in bed at night to pilots checking their electronic flight bag in the cockpit.

As per other comments, my guess is somewhere between 1% and 5% of ipad mini sales are to pilots. It's gotta be significant or they wouldn't drop a line that in their main copy!

from previous [1] threads on the iPad Mini, at least aircraft pilots are a target audience

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421163

I've been hoping for a water and dust resistant tablet for use in the pottery studio for a while (for photographing work in progress, cataloguing glaze ingredients, taking notes, etc), as it's a wet and dirty environment, but the price kills all interest.

They only sell around six million minis per year, so it's not a large market (for Apple).

I can give you at least one group that loves them. Taxi/uber drivers who use them as bigger displays for their maps and apps.

People waiting for >v1 Duo? Same processor, 1" larger screen, lower cost but you still carry a phone.

I wish they would do that. I'd love a dedicated $200-$300 ereader from Apple.

You can't just spin up factories producing top of the line components like RAM. It's an extremely expensive process