Value/$ in iPad basically has not changed since 2022. Inflation (general and AI/antitrust-driven component shortages) has cancelled out technical gains.
I would not assume it is software-locked. Display controller on 120Hz ProMotion displays is more expensive. Also, the panel itself is likely cheaper LTPS vs. LTPO.
The question you I think should ask is who finds this value reasonable?. To which, I can only answer my myself who can’t see any reason to upgrade from my iPhone 15.
I'm on iPhone 13 and only reason I'd like to upgrade is my battery is poor now and because I have a small crack on the back glass, Apple requires me changing both the back glass and battery which is $500 CAD.
For humans that don’t follow every tiny little bit of news and recall it for one word non-secular answers to things…
I assume this guy is saying that I should upgrade my iPhone 15 because of an Israeli tech company, Cellebrite. Implying that I need to stay current on my phone hardware in order to be not targeted by a nation state actor.
“nation state actor” makes it sound unlikely. They sell boxes to many different governments, including the FBI. If you ever cross an international border you should have a modern device running the latest patches.
Keep looking at your feet, you might find the point there someday.
The point isn’t the money. It’s the value.
Is that easier for you to understand? Perhaps I should refute my own argument since you are having trouble getting to a point in which you can agree or disagree?
Yeah, you phrased it better. I am really frustrated these days. The (more accurate) statement I should made is: "The only people who can afford devices like this are smart enough to question the value."
It's hard to even know what price to use to calculate the delta, since there are different processors with different memory capacities, different CPUs based on memory, and higher price for the nano-texture display.
But yeah, a top-of-the-line iPad mini costs well more than an MBA, which seems kind of nuts. Add on a keyboard case and Apple Pencil Pro and you're looking at $1,500.
Is it? I’m curious what use-cases you think are the most relevant here.
Putting the ipad right next to the sink when doing dishes is the best I can come up with. Or maybe if it’s used in a business context, such as for salespeople doing a promotion on a sidewalk
Can definitely attest to this. When I was doing my PPL I had an iPad that had a built-in cellular modem loaded with ForeFlight for GPS positioning mounted to the inside of the cessna's window.
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.
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!
I like using my 6th gen as an erader. With the right color settings the screen doesn’t fatigue me, and it’s nice to be able to read from any source (kindle, Apple Books, Libby, a pdf, etc).
Nurses and elderly homes are a large market for minis in Japan. You get up to date patient data without the bulkiness of a regular iPad or the minimal screen of an iPhone. It also surprisingly fits in the pockets of nurse uniforms.
Sure, but that tells you that the upgraded specs and pricing is a conscious decision made by Apple, not something forced by AI. Making an entry-level mini equivalent of the 11-inch iPad is always an option. They’re choosing not to take it.
Memory and storage is expensive as hell, so they're gonna ration it for their more expensive devices.
Same reason this year, for the first time ever, Apple announced their new Pro phones (and the ultra-expensive Duo) but no base-model iPhone 18. They're paying more for memory so they're gonna use it on the devices where they make more on a sale.
Right. The prices are up for Nvidia’s benefit (and Micron, Sandisk by extension).
I know it’s now a trope to say “an incoming Democratic Congress should…” but there are really serious questions to ask about the means by which Nvidia is securing such a radically high value buy-and-hold strategy, and whether it amounts to deceptive channel stuffing.
The whole tech industry is using apparent demand for Blackwell GPUs as a proxy for AI demand, when this is a wholly broken metric because Nvidia seems to be gaming it, and everyone (consumer and business alike) is paying more as a result.
The whole supply demand spherical cow model of capitalism really breaks down when suppliers decide they'd collectively use their cartel to not engage in demand and instead gouge prices.
It doesn't, capitalism is the free association without coercsion. When the government can mandate that you cannot sell certain GPUs to customers in specific areas or that your model is too scary and you must shut it down and can give or take government contracts that are work hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and the federal reserve will bail out the banks If they make mistakes, you have a crony capitalist environment that has very little to do with the free market.
They are working on it (CXMT for RAM and YMTC for NAND flash) but not having access to ASML’s EUV lithography equipment hobbles them.
The US government is also trying to kneecap them, threatening Apple with tariffs if they went ahead with YMTC storage, even if only for the Chinese market.
They are thus primarily focusing on the Chinese market, but if they weren’t there, DRAM and flash is a global commodity market and prices would have gone up even more insanely than today.
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).
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
I'm sure there is a point of diminishing returns for display refresh rates, but I can tell you from experience that it is definitely higher than 60hz. 90hz feels meaningfully smoother (on a Steam deck), and 120/144hz (on a desktop monitor in my case) feels smoother than that. Even mouse input latency is perceptibly lower. I've never used a display faster than 144hz but I honestly would not be surprised to discover that one can still tell the difference well past 144hz.
60fps is basically fine as long as you are unaware that it can be any better, but once you find out you are forever spoiled by the knowledge.
I'm sure mouse latency is a big issue for iPad Mini users.
I know there's a sizable contingent of people who just think a bigger number is better, but realistically this is a device for passively consuming text and video content that is typically around 30 fps anyway. Why waste the battery power on faster refresh?
The ProMotion screens have variable refresh rate depending on the content displayed. 10Hz to 120Hz for iPhones and 24Hz to 120Hz for iPads. So in theory the power consumption should be even better than a regular screen for static content like reading text.
Not sure about iPads, but going from a pixel 3 to a pixel 5 made me feel like my pixel 3 was broken. Xr to 16 pro was similar, but that is because Xr was legit broken.
It’s definitely not true even now. Even a moderately fast finger drag will lag noticeably - usually by at least a frame in even very carefully tuned situations. It’s just physics. If you aren’t noticing it, you’re just used to it.
Try rapidly dragging up and down to scroll a web page.
For some people, it’s motion sickness inducing of it gets too laggy
> Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?
Yes, for me issues with apps have mainly been in poorly optimized code causing lag, slow loading and the like. The 60hz/120hz thing has never really been a practical issue.
That argument goes the other way though? The only reason TV manufacturers would leave frame interpolation on by default is that a decent chunk of people notice, those people care, and most of the people who notice are "normal people" who aren't repulsed by it.
If only "pro consumers" noticed or cared... well, those "pro consumers" are the ones who think it looks like shit and would rather have a TV without it.
Nobody ever wanted a >60Hz display, but once you've used one it's hard to go back. It's like having a higher-performance car. You're now stuck with paying more just for baseline happiness.
It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.
I keep hearing this all the time, and I think this is an absolutely massive overstatement that you cannot go back to 60 hz after experiencing high refresh rates.
My personal experience is that I do notice the difference - for like a minute - and then I adjust and never care anymore.
Strangely enough, I can't use a sub-120hz phone anymore, but I have no problems using my 60hz laptop or 75hz desktop monitor. Maybe the different form factors let people compartmentalize their experiences.
I think Apple has held off 120 Hz for so long precisely because the average person gets a bit of a jolt of "this device is fast, it runs so smooth compared to..." they can't quite immediately place until someone explains it's the refresh rate.
Without this, it'd be very hard for an average user to "feel" a performance difference between an A18 Pro in the Neo and say as far as the M5 Max in a MacBook Pro unless they had a "special" use case which really needed the extra CPU/GPU cores.
Of course, they can't stay forever on that. E.g. with the iPhone 17 they finally flipped the non-Pro over. Probably because it was starting to make the iPhone seem sluggish/stuttery compared to other phones more than it was making the iPhone 18 seem fast. Tablets have never seemed to be as fierce a market in terms of your average Joe comparing them, but I'd expect the same switch to being a liability instead of a tool will happen there as well (if they aren't already late to the game).
I think they made iOS run slower for 60Hz devices. Like 2-3 version ago they changed all the animations and it makes it unbearable to use my iPHone 17 on 60Hz when I used to prefer running my old Samsungs on 60Hz several years ago.
> they aren't "gamers," they're just people who sometimes play games
I thought that basically fits the definition of "gamer" so I'm clearly mistaken. How do you define "gamer"? Someone who "always" plays games? (for some definition of "always"?)
Regardless, non "gamer" game players can still benefit from higher refresh rate screens, and they're not insignificant in number.
Someone was complaining to me that Apple took a long time to add 120 Hz displays to phones. I didn't even know what my iPhone had, turns out it's 60 Hz cause it's a 12 mini. I've used 120 Hz displays before. Cannot tell the difference.
Some people are born with nervous systems which aren’t capable of noticing the difference, just like there are people who can’t see better than 20/20 no matter how good their optical acuity is.
Thanks for the link, checked it and well even side by side on my mbp, the difference is not that super obvious. 30 to 60 fps is very obvious and night and day. 60 fps and 120 fps, I only notice the difference side by side if I pay attention...
But maybe it's because I'm 40+ with relatively bad eye vision and 20 years earlier I'd be noticing the difference much more.. But I'd say going from 1080p to 4k was a lot more obvious than that...
I doubt there's much difference because of the adaptive refresh rate, it runs at a lower rate most of the time and only uses 120 when it decides that would be useful.
But if you really don't want it, Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Limit Frame Rate will cap it at 60.
There's also an option to prefer page rendering updates near 60 hz buried in Safari's feature flags settings. This one defaults to on, presumably to protect the battery life from asshole web developers and advertisers.
Yeah, that would be fair. Personally I just want it globally disabled, idc. But maybe there's 1 in 100 times I do care and can turn it on, that'd be nice.
Frustratingly, built in Mac displays kinda force enable it. You can at least reduce the max nits to be the same as max screen brightness, rather than the insane "XDR" default where HDR can go nearly 3x the max brightness. You can also make a custom color profile that disables HDR, but this disables the screen brightness controls, which isn't worth.
Forgot to say... This test proves that my eyes/brain are capable of seeing the difference. But this is a test deliberately meant to show the difference, and even then I have to focus on it. I'm not going to passively notice for almost all content onscreen.
I think this varies a lot from person to person. I find the effect to be incredibly subtle - one of my monitors reset it self to 60hz a while back, and I didn't catch the problem for days.
Sure, and maybe I'm odd, but I don't read text while scrolling. I stop scrolling and then read. So yes, if I just scroll up and down quickly I can see the refresh is different, but otherwise I don't notice it in my regular usage.
Plus we all grew up reading the 24fps text scroll in the Star Wars intro just fine. Until we convince a new generation of cinematographers to shoot in 120fps, it all seems a bit moot - even most digitally-authored content doesn't exceed 60fps (and tech people are the first to complain about things like the soap opera effect...)
There is a big difference between watxhing a movie and operating a device where your input makes things move on the screen, you notice the depay way more.
I find that watching something like a fast-pan in 24fps footage on a modern LCD is horrific. CRTs used to inherently smooth this sort of thing out, but now we get these harsh frame transitions. As much as the soap-opera-effect is maligned, a high refresh rate LCD needs some form of motion prediction for low frame rate content.
Yeah, which is why those TVs doing frame interpolation or whatever are beneficial for most people as long as they do it well. Even though AV pros might get annoyed at the fakeness.
The way frame rate work on conventional film vs. an LCD are completely different. It’s like trying to ask the bitrate of a Vinyl record.
Conventional film projectors don’t show each frame continuously, they transition the shutter blade smoothly between frames, and projectors often flash each one a couple of times (48 or 72hz). A cinema projector is going to demolish a LCD in smoothness and motion quality even if it technically has a higher refresh rate on paper.
So when remastering from film, do they put each frame into the digital video and keep it 24 fps, or do they play the film and digitally record it at 60 fps to capture the projector effect?
Can you not literally see the frames skip as you move the mouse cursor across the screen? To me it’s OBVIOUS and excruciating and I’m only a light/casual gamer and use all my computers for work.
If I move my cursor slowly I can see the difference, I guess? But I don't habitually do that - I run with mouse/trackpad dialled to maximum acceleration, even at 120Hz there's a skip when you flick the cursor halfway across the screen. And I'm rarely scrolling a line at a time, I'm going page at a time.
I don't really get the obsession with smooth movement for desktop use (as opposed to gaming). Possibly this is a generational thing? Why is anyone intentionally using a computer primarily via slow analogue inputs?
What you definitely notice between 60Hz vs 120Hz on a phone is the battery drain.
Depends a lot on the usage I guess. In a tablet where you may draw etc you can notice the difference definitely. Or if you play games on the phone. But otherwise I don't think the difference is that important as it is sometimes claimed.
I used to switch between a MacBook Pro with a 120Hz display and a MacBook Air with a 60Hz display and never noticed any difference. I think I could probably have noticed if I'd put them side by side and compared the feel of the scrolling, but why would I do that?
There's a minority of people who really do notice stuff like this, which is fine. The problem is that for some reason, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that they're a minority.
Not for me. I tried out the high refresh rate thing, switched back to 60.. can't tell any difference at all. Same for high DPI vs "regular" DPI screens.
Screen flicker on CRTs with low refresh rates was terrible for me, but with modern flat panels.. nope, can't really tell the difference.
The difference is extremely noticable on a PC when you're dragging windows around with a mouse (or gaming of course). Especially if you have a dual-monitor setup and only one of them does the high refresh rate.
Not sure I'd notice it much on a phone.
And for decades we've had people claiming that 30fps is just fine for gaming...
> 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
"I don't have an issue with it, so most people also don't have an issue with it"
It happens when someone overestimates how much other people agree with them, assuming that their own personal beliefs, values, or experiences are the default for everyone else.
The comment wasn't saying "I don't have an issue with it." It said "regular people in my life." In fact, maybe the commenter is one of the few people who have an issue with it.
For doomscrolling or watching videos it makes little difference. For an iPad that advertises drawing with the pencil, the latency of the brushstroke is a massive difference between the two. The more immediate feedback unlocks more confidence and reduces a lot of friction.
From what I can tell, it's the thing they notice more than almost anything else. I was recently shopping for a new phone and my brother, who has no interest in tech, kept telling me I need to get the one with it (I forgot the exact term he used, it wasn't 120hz admittedly).
My Samsung Galaxy has a switch for either 120hz or better battery life. Never bothered to even try the 120hz. The phone feels fine. Hell, the only reason I even upgraded to this one was to get security fixes.
Yes? 30-60 is night and day so i have a hard time believing this.
There is an argument to be made on battery life 60-120 but my god i can instantly tell between 60-120. The key part is the input responsiveness more than anything else. If you tell someone to look at “frame rate” few will notice the dif but have them grab a window and wiggle it around, obv dif with responsiveness
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.
I think another thing to keep in mind is that there’s probably an element of sensory adaptation at play here. Like when you wear a watch: you notice it at first, and then you don’t notice it on your wrist anymore.
So if you’re actively moving between a high-refresh-rate device (like a lot of people here with their 144hz monitors) and then one with a lower refresh rate, you’re probably more sensitive (and potentially annoyed) by the discrepancy.
You will notice this as soon as you use a low dpi device again for any length of time. First 10 minutes you see the pixels. After that you stop seeing the pixels.
Viewing distance plays a factor too. I realized 4k tvs are useless to me because I can't perceive 1080p pixels unless I'm comparison shopping in a TV show room from 2 feet away (probably why they don't let you experience appropriate TV viewing distances in these spaces in the first place).
I'm one of those who can't spot a difference. I've tried to with the mouse trick or scrolling and I just can't see it. I can see the difference between 30fps and 60fps but anything north of 60fps is imperceptible to me. Maybe it's from a lifetime of gaming on toaster specs where I'd scarcely break 25fps.
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.
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!
What's magical about 60 there? I'd naively think you'd just want VRR and some power saving render rate behavior rather than a fixed target framerate equal to the max framerate for all types of content all the time. The latter gives you neither good power saving nor good experience in most combinations.
Look at Apple’s own smartphone lineup. The Pro models with 120Hz screens get better battery life than the low end iPhone models.
You could make up for the difference in battery life with an almost undetectable amount of extra battery capacity from both a cost and size standpoint.
I think you missed the point of their comment. The point is they are reducing features (marginal cost difference for them) to provide a worse experience for a cheaper model. I'm pretty sure it's less complicated to have a shared manufacturing process with fewer SKUs than to have two separate displays (if they're even different and not just software locked).
Do you think they couldn't add a refresh rate control to the device if you wanted to have lower battery? They already have variable refresh rate implemented, a much harder problem.
I remember the age of when Intel used to lock down hardware multipliers for overclocking behind the K versions, and GPUs did too. This is a well known practice, and Apple is not above it.
the irony is that 120hz screens are actually 1-120hz vs constant 60hz which makes it more battery efficient most of the time except for when you're scrolling
LG were the first to ship products with Tandem OLED, in the automotive market. Apple were not even the first in the mobile or PC markets, being beaten by Huawei and Dell, respectively.
Most 5K monitors on the PC side are not going to be driven over Thunderbolt, but rather DisplayPort or HDMI.
And the most popular resolution on PC is not 4k, but rather 1080p and 1440p.
> Which is why most of the PC world is on cheap 4k monitors still.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey for last month, 47.91% of Steam users are on 1920x1080; adding the 2.56% on 1920x1200 means that a majority of users are still on 2K. The next biggest chunk of users are on 2560x{1440, 1600}, at about 32%. Only 5% of users are on 4K resolutions or greater.
And these are gamers, who are more likely than the average user to care about graphical fidelity. Most of the PC world just does not care about 4K, period.
To the average consumer, deep blacks will look great in the next Avengers movie.
To the average consumer, obsessing over scroll feeling not completely perfect is a distraction from watching the next Avengers movie, if not downright neurotic behavior.
To a prosumer, the value may be obvious but the price may not be worth it. Which can lead to a distaste for the company, for not being a more accommodating company.
To a professional, if you need it, you need it, and you begrudgingly pay for it. Because you need it.
I don’t even know what my phone screen has. Wasn’t why I bought the pro at the time. Wanted the additional ram. So I wouldn’t feel as pressed to upgrade now. (Prosumer, aka neurotic.)
I could not care less about any refresh rate over 30.
You can care about it, but that just means it sounds like a differentiator to me, not something everyone should pay for just because you care about it.
You will have to somehow prove it if you would say that the panel and driver chip are all already ready to do 100+ hz for free by default, and are actually artificially limited, and that that artificial limitation doesn't come with some other advantage like battery life (allowing a smaller battery or less cost in some other way).
Or, jokes aside, I honestly think that you might just have beefier time-integrating sensory-processing circuits in your brain than I do. Really. I do profoundly notice the difference, and it's a gritty and distracting thing. A slight but persistently intrusive and distracting perceptual thing. I honestly wish I didn't notice, but I do. I basically ask this: believe us when we ask for higher framerates and lower end-to-end latency.
And I'm fairly certain that the hardware and software to do higher frame rates across the board is a baseline commodity in the Apple source hardware ecosystem the build and integrate from. And it's certainly a better fit to consider it a line drawn between "pro" and "not pro" for marketing and pricing purposes than any fundamental and meaningful price-of-equipment threshold.
Usually it's low FPS (if FPS at all) that causes motion sickness. This comes up in VR discussion a lot. IIRC like 90Hz is considered a minimum.
I get horribly motion sick playing some games like Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime, or the original DOOM. I run my phone at 120Hz and like it. For games, cranking up the FoV tends to help, also disabling effects like viewbobbing, blur, shaking, etc.
I understand this is not fun to experiment with, though. Once I'm motion sick, I tend to be the entire day, only sleeping fixes it, so I'm not usually excited to keep trying to tweak the thing that makes me sick. I tend to dive into settings before playing any game now. I hate when it auto starts the game to appear cinematic.
If they INSIST that it MUST be 60 Hz, I'd accept the consolation/compromise of 60 Hz but 0ms-ish latency. (Maybe they already do it that way.)
As in waiiiiit until the 16.67ms between frames is almost up while sampling inputs, then bam!, render quicky, bam!, transfer it over a link that could carry more than 60 frames per second, bam!, fast OLED display. Each frame fresh and close to input.
To the why?-sayers: Because the difference is noticeable. We can get all philosophical and discuss whether it's a competitive advantage for someone to not notice the difference, or vice versa. Why the why?, why not just… take us difference-noticers on our word? Like… we're not taking your 60Hz 16.67ms crunchiness away from you?
"Maybe they already do it that way" refers to Apple's implementation of the iPad Mini OLED.
It's extremely interesting, and I'll be frank here, that people who just can't tell the difference are usually judgy and kind of status- and comparison-oriented towards people. In my experience. Others may not notice that difference.
Yup. Had an MacBook Air. Slight water damage near charging port. Laptop functioned correctly on AC power. Extensive battery diagnostics: Healthy. Just the charging circuit saying "go ahead, charge device"...
At the Genius Bar expected something reasonable, realistic... $300? Parts and labor.
"So we have a quote for you, $950. Perhaps we go out and look at the new Macs together?"
90% of the cost of the laptop to replace the charging port.
From a retailer point of view this is reasonable. All bets are off with water damage: when water is involved a small amount of damage can also just mean “the whole board is toast.”
Even with a fully modular system like a Framework laptop you’d potentially be looking at more than just replacing the port. The electricity doesn’t just stop at the charging port. You’re still potentially thinking about $500+ for a board.
Unfortunately we don’t live in China and low level board repair technicians aren’t hanging around every electronics market in town.
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.
You're right, the self-service repair program exists. It doesn't clear neither the pairing issue nor parent's hurdles though, as Apple parts are still required , you can't get any similar enough screen you'd want, and they'll be priced the same as in Apple Stores.
As far as I remember, the self-repair kits only make sense in very niche cases (I think repair shop get a different contract ?) and won't work around any limitations Apple puts on parts or repairs.
I did not call Apple, this was a local "fix my iPad" shop.
It was funny, the guy was narrating as he is searching saying "Whoa, this is the most I've ever seen... Wow, oh man... Hold on..."
I knew it was not going to be good.
I asked if there were any DIY options for me.
He said I could possibly find a used iPad online and swap that screen. But, given the insane prices of the replacement screen, I assume the secondary market for a salvageable iPad that works is really tough.
At this point it makes sense to just buy another used iPad.
your ex’s cat chewed on the corner of an iPad? Does the cat have some more interesting stories of destruction since it apparently likes chewing on metal/glass, a higher level of destruction setting than the standard cat.
This is flat out not true, the “other damage” (I.e., it can be damaged in basically any way) for the iPad Air M4 is $699.
The only iPad with an M4 that matches that price is the iPad Pro M4 13” with the cellular modem with an “other service” cost of $1149.
If you buy a 13” iPad Pro with the cellular modem today that’s a $1700 iPad. So while $1200 is a high repair cost, Apple is basically saying you can completely total your iPad and break pretty much everything on it and they’ll give you a $500 discount on a new one.
But the market price on that model used is way higher than $500.
I bought it off Facebook marketplace. The guy selling it apparently was granted the device from his work and then didn't need it. I didn't get the sense it was sketchy at all but now I'm wondering a bit. I had no idea it was that expensive new, I'm sad that this thing appears to be a brick now!
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.
Just because it's good doesn't mean it can't be better
The novelty of how thin my M5 iPad Pro is still hasn't worn off. Sometimes it's just nice to hold some tech in your hand that feels like it's from the future.
Since when have we established "thinner and lighter" equals "better"?
In the case of iPhone Air and Galaxy Edge phones, there were notable compromises to achieve a thinner body, for which many people don't consider an improvement.
Granted, I have not seen or used the new iPad mini, and I don't know if any such compromise has been made. But probably should leave it open until we conclude this is a plus.
I’ve been raw dogging my mini for the past couple of days because I removed the Smart Folio to wash off all the accumulated gunk. The sudden thinness and lightness was amazing.
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.
I would love Apple to actually make something that is worthy of the name Apple. When Steve was alive, Apple was A-P-P-L-E and now it is just a shell of its self.
I don't like when they force a storage upgrade just to get a matte screen. I have no need for more storage, but would like a matte screen. As a $100 upgrade for nanotexture, it already seems steep, but forcing it to a $200 upgrade due to a needless storage bump is too much to ignore.
I also question what is required for nanotexture. I read the iPhone Duo has this in a replaceable screen protector, effectively. A replacement, under AppleCare is $15. Are we being charged $100 for a factory installed screen protector? If so, why does that need to be tied to certain levels of storage to reduce SKUs?
As a life long and continuous Apple user (and iOS SWE), I recently got a $150 Samsung Android tablet that I can use as a claude interface. It can take in voice commands, and create new builds of itself on a network Mac. So I can essentially have whatever screen or interface I want for any given moment. Right now I'm tuning my motorcycle with an OBD bluetooth device and recording engine behavior on rides.
They have enough bezel room to make it into 8.7" or even 8.9" version without changing the dimensions of the mini.
I believe this is the lightest iPad at only 255g. I just wonder how much more weight can they shave off.
And if they are going to kill the iPad? The current iPad line up is split into Pro, Air, (iPad) and Mini. Surely the mini could replace the normal iPad?
Is Stage Manager with an external monitor possible with this new iPad Mini or still artificially limited to M chips? I mean it’s more powerful than the M1 iPad Air which supports it.
I'd like to have that confirmed too. Size wise, I'd love to get a Mini, but only being able to mirror to an external display, especially at this price, is a no from me.
I don't see anything suggesting it can perform this, so likely the artificial limit is still in place.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadI was actually excited for this, but now I’m going to pass.
The question you I think should ask is who finds this value reasonable?. To which, I can only answer my myself who can’t see any reason to upgrade from my iPhone 15.
I assume this guy is saying that I should upgrade my iPhone 15 because of an Israeli tech company, Cellebrite. Implying that I need to stay current on my phone hardware in order to be not targeted by a nation state actor.
This is probably the single most well, excuuuse me, princess moment I have ever witnessed around these parts. Alright Mr Richie Rich.
The point isn’t the money. It’s the value.
Is that easier for you to understand? Perhaps I should refute my own argument since you are having trouble getting to a point in which you can agree or disagree?
You are not in the median. Half of Americans claim they do not have emergency funds, and over a quarter cannot pay their monthly bills.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/10/14/many-amer...
But yeah, a top-of-the-line iPad mini costs well more than an MBA, which seems kind of nuts. Add on a keyboard case and Apple Pencil Pro and you're looking at $1,500.
Putting the ipad right next to the sink when doing dishes is the best I can come up with. Or maybe if it’s used in a business context, such as for salespeople doing a promotion on a sidewalk
Watch, um... video podcasts while showering?
Add to that a locked OS, and you got a bingo.
The AI labs are so going to swallow Apple.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421163
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!
It’s an Apple device so tech support is minimal.
For about the same cost, I can get a used M5 chip with both a Neural Engine™ and GPU cores each with Neural Accelerators™
https://gizmodo.com/ipad-mini-oled-a20-pro-chip-2000830541#:...
AI Optimist: AI is going usher in an era of unparalleled productivity and achievement
The reality: RAM/Chip prices are way, way up. The starter iPad mini is $700.
Same reason this year, for the first time ever, Apple announced their new Pro phones (and the ultra-expensive Duo) but no base-model iPhone 18. They're paying more for memory so they're gonna use it on the devices where they make more on a sale.
I know it’s now a trope to say “an incoming Democratic Congress should…” but there are really serious questions to ask about the means by which Nvidia is securing such a radically high value buy-and-hold strategy, and whether it amounts to deceptive channel stuffing.
The whole tech industry is using apparent demand for Blackwell GPUs as a proxy for AI demand, when this is a wholly broken metric because Nvidia seems to be gaming it, and everyone (consumer and business alike) is paying more as a result.
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.
The US government is also trying to kneecap them, threatening Apple with tariffs if they went ahead with YMTC storage, even if only for the Chinese market.
They are thus primarily focusing on the Chinese market, but if they weren’t there, DRAM and flash is a global commodity market and prices would have gone up even more insanely than today.
The iPhone sells way more units than the iPad, so it makes sense that it's not a feature for the iPad mini yet.
60fps is basically fine as long as you are unaware that it can be any better, but once you find out you are forever spoiled by the knowledge.
I know there's a sizable contingent of people who just think a bigger number is better, but realistically this is a device for passively consuming text and video content that is typically around 30 fps anyway. Why waste the battery power on faster refresh?
Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?
Try rapidly dragging up and down to scroll a web page.
For some people, it’s motion sickness inducing of it gets too laggy
Yes, for me issues with apps have mainly been in poorly optimized code causing lag, slow loading and the like. The 60hz/120hz thing has never really been a practical issue.
If only "pro consumers" noticed or cared... well, those "pro consumers" are the ones who think it looks like shit and would rather have a TV without it.
It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.
My personal experience is that I do notice the difference - for like a minute - and then I adjust and never care anymore.
Without this, it'd be very hard for an average user to "feel" a performance difference between an A18 Pro in the Neo and say as far as the M5 Max in a MacBook Pro unless they had a "special" use case which really needed the extra CPU/GPU cores.
Of course, they can't stay forever on that. E.g. with the iPhone 17 they finally flipped the non-Pro over. Probably because it was starting to make the iPhone seem sluggish/stuttery compared to other phones more than it was making the iPhone 18 seem fast. Tablets have never seemed to be as fierce a market in terms of your average Joe comparing them, but I'd expect the same switch to being a liability instead of a tool will happen there as well (if they aren't already late to the game).
I don't know how "mobile" gamers are using iPads (or tablets), but considering the size of the market, I doubt it's particularly niche.
I thought that basically fits the definition of "gamer" so I'm clearly mistaken. How do you define "gamer"? Someone who "always" plays games? (for some definition of "always"?)
Regardless, non "gamer" game players can still benefit from higher refresh rate screens, and they're not insignificant in number.
Not a blind test, but the smoothness when tracking a moving object is very obvious
But maybe it's because I'm 40+ with relatively bad eye vision and 20 years earlier I'd be noticing the difference much more.. But I'd say going from 1080p to 4k was a lot more obvious than that...
But if you really don't want it, Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Limit Frame Rate will cap it at 60.
There's also an option to prefer page rendering updates near 60 hz buried in Safari's feature flags settings. This one defaults to on, presumably to protect the battery life from asshole web developers and advertisers.
Frustratingly, built in Mac displays kinda force enable it. You can at least reduce the max nits to be the same as max screen brightness, rather than the insane "XDR" default where HDR can go nearly 3x the max brightness. You can also make a custom color profile that disables HDR, but this disables the screen brightness controls, which isn't worth.
Convincing them they need more than 60hz is going to be a hard sell.
Conventional film projectors don’t show each frame continuously, they transition the shutter blade smoothly between frames, and projectors often flash each one a couple of times (48 or 72hz). A cinema projector is going to demolish a LCD in smoothness and motion quality even if it technically has a higher refresh rate on paper.
Either way, DVDs were digital 29.97 fps at most.
I don't really get the obsession with smooth movement for desktop use (as opposed to gaming). Possibly this is a generational thing? Why is anyone intentionally using a computer primarily via slow analogue inputs?
Depends a lot on the usage I guess. In a tablet where you may draw etc you can notice the difference definitely. Or if you play games on the phone. But otherwise I don't think the difference is that important as it is sometimes claimed.
There's a minority of people who really do notice stuff like this, which is fine. The problem is that for some reason, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that they're a minority.
Screen flicker on CRTs with low refresh rates was terrible for me, but with modern flat panels.. nope, can't really tell the difference.
Not sure I'd notice it much on a phone.
And for decades we've had people claiming that 30fps is just fine for gaming...
"I don't have an issue with it, so most people also don't have an issue with it"
False Consensus Effect (or false consensus fallacy):
It happens when someone overestimates how much other people agree with them, assuming that their own personal beliefs, values, or experiences are the default for everyone else.
There is an argument to be made on battery life 60-120 but my god i can instantly tell between 60-120. The key part is the input responsiveness more than anything else. If you tell someone to look at “frame rate” few will notice the dif but have them grab a window and wiggle it around, obv dif with responsiveness
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.
So if you’re actively moving between a high-refresh-rate device (like a lot of people here with their 144hz monitors) and then one with a lower refresh rate, you’re probably more sensitive (and potentially annoyed) by the discrepancy.
Viewing distance plays a factor too. I realized 4k tvs are useless to me because I can't perceive 1080p pixels unless I'm comparison shopping in a TV show room from 2 feet away (probably why they don't let you experience appropriate TV viewing distances in these spaces in the first place).
Look at Apple’s own smartphone lineup. The Pro models with 120Hz screens get better battery life than the low end iPhone models.
You could make up for the difference in battery life with an almost undetectable amount of extra battery capacity from both a cost and size standpoint.
Do you think they couldn't add a refresh rate control to the device if you wanted to have lower battery? They already have variable refresh rate implemented, a much harder problem.
I remember the age of when Intel used to lock down hardware multipliers for overclocking behind the K versions, and GPUs did too. This is a well known practice, and Apple is not above it.
- Apple introduces OLED and talks about deep blacks and 1200 bits
- Why do they think people care about the above and not 120hz as well?
To the average consumer, neither matters much. True. But the above did not make much sense to me.
120hz at 5k requires Thunderbolt 5 (ie better graphics card, more info down the pipeline.
Which is why most of the PC world is on cheap 4k monitors still.
Most 5K monitors on the PC side are not going to be driven over Thunderbolt, but rather DisplayPort or HDMI.
And the most popular resolution on PC is not 4k, but rather 1080p and 1440p.
Because that market, in aggregate, only spends extra on monitors for gaming.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey for last month, 47.91% of Steam users are on 1920x1080; adding the 2.56% on 1920x1200 means that a majority of users are still on 2K. The next biggest chunk of users are on 2560x{1440, 1600}, at about 32%. Only 5% of users are on 4K resolutions or greater.
And these are gamers, who are more likely than the average user to care about graphical fidelity. Most of the PC world just does not care about 4K, period.
To the average consumer, obsessing over scroll feeling not completely perfect is a distraction from watching the next Avengers movie, if not downright neurotic behavior.
To a prosumer, the value may be obvious but the price may not be worth it. Which can lead to a distaste for the company, for not being a more accommodating company.
To a professional, if you need it, you need it, and you begrudgingly pay for it. Because you need it.
I don’t even know what my phone screen has. Wasn’t why I bought the pro at the time. Wanted the additional ram. So I wouldn’t feel as pressed to upgrade now. (Prosumer, aka neurotic.)
I could not care less about any refresh rate over 30.
You can care about it, but that just means it sounds like a differentiator to me, not something everyone should pay for just because you care about it.
You will have to somehow prove it if you would say that the panel and driver chip are all already ready to do 100+ hz for free by default, and are actually artificially limited, and that that artificial limitation doesn't come with some other advantage like battery life (allowing a smaller battery or less cost in some other way).
Or, jokes aside, I honestly think that you might just have beefier time-integrating sensory-processing circuits in your brain than I do. Really. I do profoundly notice the difference, and it's a gritty and distracting thing. A slight but persistently intrusive and distracting perceptual thing. I honestly wish I didn't notice, but I do. I basically ask this: believe us when we ask for higher framerates and lower end-to-end latency.
And I'm fairly certain that the hardware and software to do higher frame rates across the board is a baseline commodity in the Apple source hardware ecosystem the build and integrate from. And it's certainly a better fit to consider it a line drawn between "pro" and "not pro" for marketing and pricing purposes than any fundamental and meaningful price-of-equipment threshold.
I get horribly motion sick playing some games like Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime, or the original DOOM. I run my phone at 120Hz and like it. For games, cranking up the FoV tends to help, also disabling effects like viewbobbing, blur, shaking, etc.
I understand this is not fun to experiment with, though. Once I'm motion sick, I tend to be the entire day, only sleeping fixes it, so I'm not usually excited to keep trying to tweak the thing that makes me sick. I tend to dive into settings before playing any game now. I hate when it auto starts the game to appear cinematic.
If they INSIST that it MUST be 60 Hz, I'd accept the consolation/compromise of 60 Hz but 0ms-ish latency. (Maybe they already do it that way.)
As in waiiiiit until the 16.67ms between frames is almost up while sampling inputs, then bam!, render quicky, bam!, transfer it over a link that could carry more than 60 frames per second, bam!, fast OLED display. Each frame fresh and close to input.
To the why?-sayers: Because the difference is noticeable. We can get all philosophical and discuss whether it's a competitive advantage for someone to not notice the difference, or vice versa. Why the why?, why not just… take us difference-noticers on our word? Like… we're not taking your 60Hz 16.67ms crunchiness away from you?
You didn't convince me.
It's extremely interesting, and I'll be frank here, that people who just can't tell the difference are usually judgy and kind of status- and comparison-oriented towards people. In my experience. Others may not notice that difference.
Like, is the battery running out or is a setting misconfigured somewhere? I won’t spend a dime buying any device that can’t hit at least 90-100hz+
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772#ipadobsolete
M4 chip.
Her mom's cats chewed on the corner of the screen. It won't turn on.
The cost to replace that screen: $1200.
Apparently OLED screens break completely if just a single pixel is damaged.
That's Apple saying to you: omg, stop being so poor and wasting our time, just buy another one
At the Genius Bar expected something reasonable, realistic... $300? Parts and labor.
"So we have a quote for you, $950. Perhaps we go out and look at the new Macs together?"
90% of the cost of the laptop to replace the charging port.
Even with a fully modular system like a Framework laptop you’d potentially be looking at more than just replacing the port. The electricity doesn’t just stop at the charging port. You’re still potentially thinking about $500+ for a board.
Unfortunately we don’t live in China and low level board repair technicians aren’t hanging around every electronics market in town.
That has been the case basically since Apple Care existed IMHO.
Not true. Apple has a self-service repair program for most of its products, including the iPad mini.
All the repair manuals are available online and you can buy official Apple parts. [1] They'll even sell or rent the tools you will need.
[1]: https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home
As far as I remember, the self-repair kits only make sense in very niche cases (I think repair shop get a different contract ?) and won't work around any limitations Apple puts on parts or repairs.
It was funny, the guy was narrating as he is searching saying "Whoa, this is the most I've ever seen... Wow, oh man... Hold on..."
I knew it was not going to be good.
I asked if there were any DIY options for me.
He said I could possibly find a used iPad online and swap that screen. But, given the insane prices of the replacement screen, I assume the secondary market for a salvageable iPad that works is really tough.
At this point it makes sense to just buy another used iPad.
The only iPad with an M4 that matches that price is the iPad Pro M4 13” with the cellular modem with an “other service” cost of $1149.
If you buy a 13” iPad Pro with the cellular modem today that’s a $1700 iPad. So while $1200 is a high repair cost, Apple is basically saying you can completely total your iPad and break pretty much everything on it and they’ll give you a $500 discount on a new one.
But the market price on that model used is way higher than $500.
Never once did I hold my iPad mini with a case and think, "damn this thing is heavy"
The novelty of how thin my M5 iPad Pro is still hasn't worn off. Sometimes it's just nice to hold some tech in your hand that feels like it's from the future.
In the case of iPhone Air and Galaxy Edge phones, there were notable compromises to achieve a thinner body, for which many people don't consider an improvement.
Granted, I have not seen or used the new iPad mini, and I don't know if any such compromise has been made. But probably should leave it open until we conclude this is a plus.
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.
Zoinks
edit: That's more than a MacBook Neo, they're only $1,049!
I also question what is required for nanotexture. I read the iPhone Duo has this in a replaceable screen protector, effectively. A replacement, under AppleCare is $15. Are we being charged $100 for a factory installed screen protector? If so, why does that need to be tied to certain levels of storage to reduce SKUs?
I believe this is the lightest iPad at only 255g. I just wonder how much more weight can they shave off.
And if they are going to kill the iPad? The current iPad line up is split into Pro, Air, (iPad) and Mini. Surely the mini could replace the normal iPad?
I don't see anything suggesting it can perform this, so likely the artificial limit is still in place.
Sadly not available in the West...