Why is the bezel so thick? A 1-2cm bezel around the entire "mini" device seems a bit odd, given that the iPad Mini is a relatively tiny device and phones these days come with a 1-2mm bezel (10x less useless border).
Is it a cost saving measure / sneaky margin increaser, or what might be the motivation?
Edit:
Touch interference is a good idea. Still, from the picture, it looks like the bezel could be half as thick and work well. Sorry to be such a stickler, I am genuinely curious if Apple is chasing better margins, the best feasible UX, or something else.
Could it be that since this device is only $650 USD, it isn't expensive enough to warrant a premium display? (Like the iPhone SE https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/)
If so, I wish there was a fancier "Pro" model with premium components. IIRC, I paid $1000 for my first iPad, it was the first super high-resolution one back in 2012. Perhaps there aren't enough customers who are sensitive to wasted screen real estate on an 8-inch device.. and FWIW I have noticed a constant stream of toddlers pacified by iPad Minis whenever I'm at Costco.
Bezels are useful for devices that you can’t just hold in the flat of your hand. Provides a place to hold on to.
Also, this is an LCD screen. The substrate is rigid. An OLED, like on the iPhone is on a flexible substrate and can be bent at the edges to connect to the circuit board. That lets you put the screen closer to the edge.
The technique you mention is very outdated and not used anymore. Current thin-bezel OLED panels (even on flexible substrate OLED) use a packaging technique which can be used in the exactly same way on rigid LCD panels. Folding the substrate with driver bonded is expensive, affects yields, and doesn't even get you the thinnest bezels
There are no LCD panels in recent phones that use COG packaging (chip-on-glass) for the display driver and run into the limitation you mentioned. Almost all current LCD phones will utitlize COF (chip-on-film) where the TFT array is attached to a flex-pcb which also contains the display driver.
You can achieve bezels just as thin or thinner using this technique, and Apple has used the technique you mention only once, COF is used even on flexible OLED panels.
Bezels are good. Bezels are GREAT.
They give you something to hold without interacting with the screen.
If you've ever used a device with edge-to-edge, you know you have to hold it like a diva with 10-inch nails—it is neither comfortable nor effective.
In my opinion, the industry's trend towards smaller-and-smaller bezels has made it MORE difficult to interact with them than the advances gained by having a few millimeters larger screens.
What's wrong with virtual bezels? Seems to me to be the best of both worlds. People who can't handle an ipad without bezels can just configure whatever they want.
My Boox device has small bezels around three edges and one large bezel around the left edge. It's terrific, I can hold it comfortably and there's a quick button to switch orientation if I want the bezel on another side.
The iPad mini is a second-class product in Apple's lineup. It rarely gets updated, and if you use one you will see how poorly UI is scaled. I was really hyped up and really wanted one, but after using one I gave up on the idea. The 60 Hz LCD screen is also among the worst screen of all the products Apple currently sells.
I have an iPad mini and it's pretty much perfect as it is for my use case. I use it as a device I can pick up and watch videos while on the go or doing an activity (cooking etc.), show videos to my kid and as a device I can travel with.
The only complaint I have with it is that it only supports one profile but I think that applies to all ipads
Wow, so negative! I use mine heavily, including right now. Mostly with Chrome and Google apps, though, along with Kindle. Also, Genshin Impact to play games with the kid.
Best tablet I’ve owned. Genshin Impact uses a huge amount of space, though.
that's a pity. I had a regular iPad, I used it for document browsing and regular reading. I eventually gave up on it because it was just too big and too heavy and required two hands to hold it.
I really wanted something that'more Kindle-sized, which the iPad mini seems to be, which is the perfect form factor for one handed usability.
Ipad Mini is such a good size. My friend lent me his Mini2 when he borrowed money from me and used it for a good 6 months i think and it was marvelous. I didn't use it all that much but later got an Air 2 and used it maybe slightly less. Then I got an iPad Pro 11" but only used it for a while and don't really touch it too much anymore. I feel maybe an ipad mini I would use more. But the jelly scroll really has me urked and I kinda want OLED on it, so there is definitely room for a Pro version if they wish, but the iPads are overwhelming with 5 sizes already.
So that they can release a successor model with thinner bezels.
In reality this may be to (1) to keep costs down and (2) to distance the iPad mini from the more premium iPhone Pro Max.
All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for? iPads are mostly used for media consumption, no matter how Apple wants to position them. Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware, but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads that can make use of “Apple Intelligence” (the silliest moniker since “Spatial Computing” and “Retina Display”).
The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless. Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube. What could have made a difference is a folding display. I think the iPad mini would have been the ideal candidate for that.
> Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube.
Hi, it me.
I have an iPhone 13 Mini that will have to be pried from my cold dead hands because it's about as big a phone as I'm willing to carry (I'd still rather have the 5s form factor.)
I also have an iPad Mini that supplements it perfectly.
Really don't want anything larger, because I like to handle it with one hand while walking or I'm propping it up in a tight space like when I'm watching a how-to video while doing a home-improvement project or working on my car.
There is absolutely no way I'd buy a phone as gigantic as a Max.
Honestly not sure how people walk around with those things.
> The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini
Due to the aspect ratios, there are significant differences in viewable area. It is not a "small" difference at all. Once you add in the ability to deal with specific aspect ratio content, the difference becomes even larger.
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
Not for everyone I would suggest. But I have people in my circle who will be very pleased. As they use a Mini as their phone/portable machine out of the house. They have little keyboard cases and use VOIP services for communication.
> but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads
Part of the appeal for most people is the seamless usage of features and functionalities across their sweet of products. People expect to be able to pick up where they left of, and have access to the same functionality as they largely do on the rest of the devices.
It's nice even if something is not your primary productivity device, to be able to execute or perform things on them if that's what happens to be in front of you at the time.
“ The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless.”
While the linear diagonal size of the screens are not so much different, the area of the iPad Mini is significantly larger. I ran the numbers a month or so on it when someone was making the same claim of equivalence. I don’t recall the specifics now but I think the iPad screen had at least 60% more area. That is significant.
“ Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware”
It would be hard for Apple to put in a chipset now that didn’t support AI. All of their SOCs for the past 10 years have had neural processors. This A17 Pro has 8GB of RAM. All of their recent SOCs have the 8GB of RAM needed to run AI. Why not?
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
Who is any iPad for? They’re nice screens attached to good processors.
I bring mine to work to either read or watch videos over my lunch break. Don’t want the full size of a regular iPad. Don’t want to use my work laptop with my personal service accounts like YouTube, Netflix, kindle, etc.
And while the Mini is small, it’s still a substantial screen size increase over using my regular sized iPhone for that purpose.
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
I know children who study with their iPad minis and prefer them over notebooks. This isn’t necessarily a pro-Apple statement, but rather a reflection on how different user groups may engage with devices in ways that are cognitively distinct from what we discuss here on HN.
There are also comments here about specific use cases, like pilots using tools such as ForeFlight. While this kind of usage may not drive overall demand, it highlights how certain groups find unique value in the iPad mini for their specialized needs.
It's about 9mm which is not that thick. It really does make a difference in how you can hold it one-handed and without accidentally touching the screen. Most phones and thin-bezel tablets need to be held very carefully.
I upgraded to an M2 Air from an iPad 7 a couple months ago, My biggest complaint apart from the worse battery life is that there is no way to safely hold the thing one handed while walking while not be interacting with the screen.
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't mind having a bit of bezel around the screen. It makes the device easier to grab without extra touches or fingerprints on the screen. It's also a good place for cameras and front-facing speakers. (Although I don't think any iPad has front facing speakers.)
I only ever saw one tablet with front facing speakers and I am to this way still baffled why I only saw one altogether, it seems like the most sensible design for a tablet.
I have 12 inch Honor Mate Pad 9 and I think the bezels are smaller than this thing. The tablet cost €250 and is great value for money.
I never have any issues with the thin bezel ever.
It's a tablet after all. You don't hold it and control it with one hand. Even to do so on an 8 inch tablet would be a stretch.
It's probably just that though. If the bezels were smaller, the device would be too close to an iPhone size and cannibalize sales.
I don't know but I have a Galaxy Fold and I hate the tiny bezels it has in tablet mode. Trying not to touch the screen while holding it adds unnecessary cognitive load and just makes it feel fiddly. I also have a previous gen iPad mini and I love the thicker bezels.
Screens come in standard sizes. It might simply be that they can't fit all the parts inside, including the battery, without making the device bigger than the standard screen size and so you get bezels. Bigger devices have more room in them and many of the parts are just the same size.
It's likely they're repurposing slightly older display inventory to preserve margins, recoup R&D costs and to bring overall component costs lower since this is meant to be a cheaper device.
Honestly with a tablet I prefer some bezel so I can hold it without touching the screen. I have both a 9th Gen iPad and an M2 iPad Pro, I use the “inferior” one almost exclusively.
In many ways (no pun intended :-)) I would relate to having an iPad mini and a much much dumber phone which was just text/chat and voice. I have gotten there because I'm constantly in this weird tension between wanting a bigger screen on my phone because the app I'm using and wanting a smaller phone so that it is easier to pocket and carry around. A friend of mine did the folding screen phone thing and that has its advantages but I really like a small phone (and ideally with a long battery life so no 1000 nit screens on it). Definitely first world/21st century problems :-). I do find engineering tradeoffs in product design an interesting thing though.
Most of the modern "dumbphones" (or "feature phones") would do this just fine for you.
If you want one that can survive anything life will throw at it, look at the Sonim devices - the XP3+ (flip) or XP5+ (candybar). They're Android Go, have exceptionally good (week and a half, easily) battery life, hotspot just fine, and handle actual use a lot better than the KaiOS toys out there. Maybe 3.x is better, but KaiOS 2.x couldn't handle actual use for more than a few weeks without starting to lag, requiring you to remove texts from it so the interface wasn't glacial, and mine eventually just stopped bothering to notify me about incoming calls and texts, which is your one job... The Android Go stuff seems to actually hold up to sustained moderate use.
> Most of the modern "dumbphones" (or "feature phones") would do this just fine for you.
Assuming you use something like WhatsApp, Facebook or something alike. Modern "feature phones" include built-in applications for messaging and calling, and you generally can't install anything custom on them.
For me its a very nice bedside ebook reader, reddit machine, and video device. Its a perfect size for all those things, perhaps a bit too small for video but good enough. It can fit into a large coat pocket or a medium sized purse too.
I keep trying to get into my kindle but just can't for some reason. E-ink is nice but being able to get a nice glowing black background with white text is really nice and the page changes are so much more fluid than e-ink.
Apparently Steve's posthumous roadmap focused on the idea that personal computers get 'smaller and closer to you' as time goes on. So the idea that an Apple Watch and AirPods could be all you need when travelling, etc. follows that premise.
Back in the day when Android was KitKat and full of possibilities, I ran a Nexus 7 2nd gen and a cheap phone from my carrier. I'm not sure if it was enlightenment but it was closer to it than today, where I carry around a smartphone that's too big to use comfortably but still too small to use frequently for media.
>…addicted to their phones by making Watch support exclusive to iPhone.
Buy a Garmin watch, battery life measured in weeks, and you’ll never have to re-enter your pin again because it moved on your wrist. You’ll still get great fitness tracking though and also notifications if you choose to sync them.
You can probably get fairly close to do this by using an apple watch with a sim card
I used to leave the house with just my watch and it was great - I could read and send text messages, email, even take calls on my watch and have everything synced up to my phone at home. You can even download music to it and pair it to your airpods.
The missing piece here is just having a dumb phone - somehow I think that with some ingenuity you might be able to something that serves 80% of your needs here or something like that.
A pro of foldables is that you mostly use the outer screen, but the battery is big enough to handle the inner screen. So you get excellent battery life for daily use. If you only use the inner screen for reading in dark mode the battery life is also excellent.
Also at least for the Galaxy Fold, when folded the phone is narrow enough to use one-handed and hold securely.
I've gotten myself a Honor Magic V3 and I am blown away by how good this phone is. Screen quality, battery life, camera. For me this is the holy trinity. Unfortunately now I can never go back to normal phones. I am waiting for the Huawei Mate XT second gen and making the switch.
I was just pitching this yesterday to my friend. My Pixel 8 Pro is a great phone, but in many situations I only want a phone that can show me my messages and answer my phone calls, and it's OK if its interface is my smartwatch and/or earbuds. I want it to be able to take over my mobile number on-demand, and relinquish it to my Pixel afterward.
I use the Unihertz Jelly Star alongside my iPhone 14 pro. It's a 3" android 14 phone running on a powerful soc with 8gb ram and 256gb storage. I have the same sim on both phones but I no longer carry the iPhone with me, I use it at home as an iPad micro.
The fingerprint reader isn't accurate enough so I use pattern lock for NFC payments. Texting on a 3" screen isn't much fun either, but I don't like texting anyway. At least it manages to run FUTO voice keyboard (whisper based) fast enough.
I often feel this way as well, but given the phone has replaced GPS in my car and my camera, I end up wanting newer stuff to keep those up to date. I've given up on Apple producing a magic device just for me, and accept that what we've got is pretty amazing considering the alternative is a backpack of devices to carry around.
An alternate setup is LTE smartwatch, tws and foldable phones. You can do almost all dumbphone tasks and some more from the watch. It can be relatively distraction free, and you can leave phone at home for swimming/jogging/workouts. Foldable will give you decent camera and tablet when you need it and can be kept in bag or far enough.
If I was approaching the dumb phone thing I’d try something similar to this video - “dumbify” Home Screen app for iOS, setting as gray scale, screen time limits, etc.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jVb1lLniEw
A lot of people (myself included) want that, which is exactly why it’s not going to happen - Apple would much rather see you pay twice as much for an iPhone Pro Max
It is interesting that one of their examples is a "community repair fair", they want to market a sheen of social responsibility without actually taking part themselves.
My next self-purchased laptop is also going to be one that is not a Mac and buying a 2-3 year extended warranty wouldn't cost half or one third of its price. It will also not increase its price by 25-30% if I choose to double the RAM (and by double I mean 8 to 16, not 32 or so). I asked an Apple fan once why Apple still has 8GB RAM even in their pro models and I got the response because it's Apple, you don't need more than 8GB RAM. And I actually realised why Apple gets away with such practises. They are like the 99.978% of Apple's customer base. They stand in queues to get the latest Apple device and then cry out of joy.
I bought a Dell laptop in 2007 and I was able to "deselect" Windows and it actually had reduced the price. I could do that in the third world and online and in 2007 (again!). I also got home repair in not a tier 1 city of that third world country. I think we went degradingly backwards from there.
I have a mac, absolutely love it, hate windows and yet my next laptop will be windows because of that.
You don't realize how much it matters until it does, and then it changes everything. Always having to carry an external drive just because my email takes 150gb of the 256gb MacBook storage is even more annoying than windows puting candy crush saga on the start menu.
Drives in particular. Let them solder the memory if they absolutely have to, but exposing even an empty NVMe slot should be standard for laptops. Unfortunately, Apple makes a pretty penny off the storage surcharge so I wouldn't really anticipate that anytime soon.
Hot air rework is more accessible than ever. This video is kinda over-the-top breathless, but removing components and reballing new ones isn't rocket science.
It is interesting that one of their examples is a "Mahjong Club", they want to market a sheen of board game enthusiasm without actually taking part themselves.
If it were possible to do so, I would possibly buy this as my new "phone":
- I almost never hold my phone to my ear
- I don't need the dual-lens features of the new iPhones
- Standby battery life seems up to the challenge
- Apple doesn't offer the iPhone Mini anymore, which is what I'm carrying now. If I'm going bigger, why not actually go BIGger.
Things holding me back:
- Not actually sure about the battery life
- As far as I know you can't transfer your actual phone line to a Mini
I'm pretty close to skipping out on my cell number. I very rarely use it. But that said, I do use it every so often, and when I do I need it pretty strongly. Also, I've had the same number for something like 15 years, and that's hard to walk away from.
Samsung has a Galaxy fold which I’m interested in buying as a second device. I’d imagine Apple has to have something similar as a prototype as it seems like a no brainer
Problem with current folds is that I want the screen to open/extend. I don't want to open YET ANOTHER LARGER screen. This makes most sense tbf. You want a phone to extend into a tablet, and actually have the first screen still be usable. It cuts down cost and waste of always having at least one screen always off.
Original Huawei mate x and the new trifold does what I'd like. But then again... Huawei so can't in US lol.
iPad Mini cellular is data-only. PSTN calls and SMS require a VOIP client or separate dumbphone. E2EE audio/video are available in several messaging apps, including FaceTime, making good use of the larger screen.
I've been using data-only SIMs (and now eSIMS) since 2015. Bria voip client with voip.ms providing DIDs. Works wonderfully well and I can highly recommend going voip-only if you can.
The thing holding me back from going iPad Mini instead of iPhone was Apple Watch needs the iPhone (for some reason you can't use an iPad or Mac). Not an issue anymore. But now I rely on the amazing 16 Pro camera (with Halide shooting RAW) to mostly replace my mirrorless RX1, so yet another reason to stay iPhone.
Dual? I guess some of the iPhone 16 models might have 7-8 of them by now. (I have not checked the whole 16 lineup yet, they have not bumped up the lens count, or have they?). My old 14 has 2 though. Yup, just checked - it's two. I guess it must be like two plane engines. If one is broken the other will work (I also guess/hope that's how plane engines work).
> iPhone Mini anymore, which is what I'm carrying now
I tried. The battery was atrocious. To make the battery last till early or kinda late evening I had to actively not use the phone, so I finally gave in and moved to the smallest iPhablet i.e iPhone 14 at that time (actually there was 15 as well but I guess the only difference for me between the two was the price difference). It's been said iPhone Mini 13 was the last of the small phone lineage and there will be no more.
The mini is the absolute sweet spot for me - enough portability that I don’t mind the many restrictions of iPad OS. But the A-line chips and low-quality screen are problems, and not being able to properly dock it at a monitor is a real hinderance. None of those are addressed here, unfortunately.
If you meant "not having Stage Manager", I'm genuinely surprised the A18 Pro wasn't considered powerful enough to run it, given that it outperforms the M1 that was. The only thing I could think of is that Apple thinks the smaller screen is too small for Stage Manager.
I still think they should support it anyway, even if only for three apps at a time on the primary display. iPadOS is weirdly bifurcated into two different window management strategies (Split View vs. Stage Manager) based on what device you bought, which is confusing. They should be expanding Stage Manager to as many devices as possible.
it allows you to enable stage manager on an ipad mini without problems and without needing to jailbreak or similar :). the only gotcha is, that the ipad mini doesn't support more than 1080p output, therefore, if you connect a 4k screen it will remain blank.
would love to know if the ipad mini 7 now supports 4k - would actually be a meaningful upgrade then.
Speaking of screens, I wonder if they fixed the jelly scroll. It doesn’t bother me that much on my mini, but it would be ridiculous to keep that flaw as-is in the newer gen.
The real fix would be for them to stop being so stingy with 120hz panels, as long as they keep using 60hz ones they're going to be prone to jelly scrolling in one orientation or the other. With 60hz the best you can hope for is that the orientation you use the most often is the good one this time.
> and not being able to properly dock it at a monitor is a real hinderance
Can you expand on that? It seems to support DisplayPort over USB-C, and there are a number of 1st and 3rd party adapters that have DP out, power in, and a USB2.0 plug for your other devices. What does “properly” docking it look like?
The A-series chips only support screen mirroring; with the M-class iPads you can have stage manager and multiple windows across two displays; and the main display runs at native resolution. It’s a far better (though still flawed) experience.
There are a bunch of UX differences between an iPad and a laptop while connected to a docking station that make using an iPad in that manner not quite satisfactory. For example, the iPad's screen always has to be on - while you can choose to either mirror or extend your desktop environment, you can't use only the external monitors and shut your case like you can with a laptop.
If were picking random stuff to compare it against, for $250 Motorola will sell you a phone with a 6.7", 395ppi, 120hz OLED screen. It also comes with a stylus and has 256GB storage standard.
Obviously these aren't directly comparable products but neither are iPads and budget laptops, and Apple asks $750 for a model with equivalent storage and a cellular modem. For a lot of people the screen probably is perfectly adequate but I can also see why some potential buyers would be pretty disappointed given the price point, especially since unlike the air apple doesn't even offer an upsell option at this size.
The M1 allows you to use it like a proper laptop for productivity: hook it up to an external display, keyboard and mouse, and it’s a perfect machine for ms-word, PowerPoint or excel. I have my iPad Air connected to a 32 inch monitor for video editing with Final Cut Pro.
Was patiently waiting for the mini getting an update - i don’t care as much for the screen, CPU etc. but not moving the front facing camera to the side, hence landscape friendly position is beyond me.
The whole chassis is weak, old... One camera still? Lame... The thermals are mediocre, at best. And the iPhone 15 Pro I just got makes me look forward to the winter. I expect similar experiences with this. When you write/draw on it, it does get hot. Same battery life is not bad, but it could use some more when you use the Pencil.
Touch ID is another very very weird thing to keep. I wonder what sort of market buys that and they don't want to upgrade anything... It feels so weird...
If you check Apple's comparison, at least on that overview, it seems they changed only the processor, networking, that HDR thingy on the camera, and... that's all. Everything else is the same.
Selling machine learning stuff as "intelligence" raises false expectations and is ultimately fraud. I can't wait for this whole overblown hype to crash and burn.
Everybody knows that "magic" is not to be taken literally because it doesn't exist. Intelligence, OTOH, has at least some credible instances on this planet of ours, so those are not exactly comparable.
That's an Apple thing. They developed this habit (if not addiction) after bringing features to their devices very late, sometimes a decade later than their competitors. They thought it was better to call those basic features with fancy multi word names with ™ symbols at the end and that resonates with their fan base in perfect harmony. So I think the habit stuck.
I dunno, it could be construed as a marketing phrase well enough, not unlike other technologies they have - True Tone, Cinema, etc. I mean the Apple TV isn't a TV.
Autopilot is more henious I think because it was actually marketed as autopilot.
Apple will make smart light bulb and sell it as a revolutionary intelligent light control system. If it weren't for their brand reputation, they'd look like one of the worst scam companies in tech, right down to the spelling mistakes in their descriptions (for some reason they don't like to use definite or indefinite articles for their products which always make their marketing seem like a bad machine translation to me).
It's just their new brand name. I get the impression they are bringing genAI to boomers in a user friendly way. While everyone of us on HN have used chatGPT and knows the pros/cons, the regular users need a more gentle introduction using the basic use cases such as proofreading and simple image editing.
I was underwhelmed reading the link about the upcoming Intelligence features, but I put myself into the shoes of my dad and thought... well I guess that's a good starting point.
If Apple's listening.. a 120Hz would have sold this for me. I'm still on a 2018 iPad Pro because the upgrade isn't worth the enormous cost including a basic keyboard and pencil, and the only device that has a 120Hz drawing experience is that iPad Pro.
For anyone who thinks the pencil on a 60Hz screen is "great", you need to try it on an iPad Pro next time you're in the apple store. You'll see the difference between the "ink" trailing and lagging, and actually drawing as you move the nib.
Readit News
Is it a cost saving measure / sneaky margin increaser, or what might be the motivation?
Edit:
Touch interference is a good idea. Still, from the picture, it looks like the bezel could be half as thick and work well. Sorry to be such a stickler, I am genuinely curious if Apple is chasing better margins, the best feasible UX, or something else.
Could it be that since this device is only $650 USD, it isn't expensive enough to warrant a premium display? (Like the iPhone SE https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/)
If so, I wish there was a fancier "Pro" model with premium components. IIRC, I paid $1000 for my first iPad, it was the first super high-resolution one back in 2012. Perhaps there aren't enough customers who are sensitive to wasted screen real estate on an 8-inch device.. and FWIW I have noticed a constant stream of toddlers pacified by iPad Minis whenever I'm at Costco.
Also, this is an LCD screen. The substrate is rigid. An OLED, like on the iPhone is on a flexible substrate and can be bent at the edges to connect to the circuit board. That lets you put the screen closer to the edge.
There are no LCD panels in recent phones that use COG packaging (chip-on-glass) for the display driver and run into the limitation you mentioned. Almost all current LCD phones will utitlize COF (chip-on-film) where the TFT array is attached to a flex-pcb which also contains the display driver.
You can achieve bezels just as thin or thinner using this technique, and Apple has used the technique you mention only once, COF is used even on flexible OLED panels.
If you've ever used a device with edge-to-edge, you know you have to hold it like a diva with 10-inch nails—it is neither comfortable nor effective.
In my opinion, the industry's trend towards smaller-and-smaller bezels has made it MORE difficult to interact with them than the advances gained by having a few millimeters larger screens.
Leave the bezels alone, bud
The only complaint I have with it is that it only supports one profile but I think that applies to all ipads
Best tablet I’ve owned. Genshin Impact uses a huge amount of space, though.
I really wanted something that'more Kindle-sized, which the iPad mini seems to be, which is the perfect form factor for one handed usability.
without jobs it's just a matter of time they go back to being "just an expensive dell" like before
So you have somewhere to actually hold the bloody thing.
Bezelless gadgets look great in photos but are impractical as fuck to handle.
In reality this may be to (1) to keep costs down and (2) to distance the iPad mini from the more premium iPhone Pro Max.
All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for? iPads are mostly used for media consumption, no matter how Apple wants to position them. Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware, but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads that can make use of “Apple Intelligence” (the silliest moniker since “Spatial Computing” and “Retina Display”).
The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless. Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube. What could have made a difference is a folding display. I think the iPad mini would have been the ideal candidate for that.
Hi, it me.
I have an iPhone 13 Mini that will have to be pried from my cold dead hands because it's about as big a phone as I'm willing to carry (I'd still rather have the 5s form factor.)
I also have an iPad Mini that supplements it perfectly.
Really don't want anything larger, because I like to handle it with one hand while walking or I'm propping it up in a tight space like when I'm watching a how-to video while doing a home-improvement project or working on my car.
There is absolutely no way I'd buy a phone as gigantic as a Max.
Honestly not sure how people walk around with those things.
Due to the aspect ratios, there are significant differences in viewable area. It is not a "small" difference at all. Once you add in the ability to deal with specific aspect ratio content, the difference becomes even larger.
https://displaywars.com/6,9-inch-d%7B19,5x9%7D-vs-8,3-inch-d...
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
Not for everyone I would suggest. But I have people in my circle who will be very pleased. As they use a Mini as their phone/portable machine out of the house. They have little keyboard cases and use VOIP services for communication.
> but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads
Part of the appeal for most people is the seamless usage of features and functionalities across their sweet of products. People expect to be able to pick up where they left of, and have access to the same functionality as they largely do on the rest of the devices.
It's nice even if something is not your primary productivity device, to be able to execute or perform things on them if that's what happens to be in front of you at the time.
While the linear diagonal size of the screens are not so much different, the area of the iPad Mini is significantly larger. I ran the numbers a month or so on it when someone was making the same claim of equivalence. I don’t recall the specifics now but I think the iPad screen had at least 60% more area. That is significant.
“ Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware”
It would be hard for Apple to put in a chipset now that didn’t support AI. All of their SOCs for the past 10 years have had neural processors. This A17 Pro has 8GB of RAM. All of their recent SOCs have the 8GB of RAM needed to run AI. Why not?
Who is any iPad for? They’re nice screens attached to good processors.
I bring mine to work to either read or watch videos over my lunch break. Don’t want the full size of a regular iPad. Don’t want to use my work laptop with my personal service accounts like YouTube, Netflix, kindle, etc.
And while the Mini is small, it’s still a substantial screen size increase over using my regular sized iPhone for that purpose.
I know children who study with their iPad minis and prefer them over notebooks. This isn’t necessarily a pro-Apple statement, but rather a reflection on how different user groups may engage with devices in ways that are cognitively distinct from what we discuss here on HN.
There are also comments here about specific use cases, like pilots using tools such as ForeFlight. While this kind of usage may not drive overall demand, it highlights how certain groups find unique value in the iPad mini for their specialized needs.
You know, you could just read all the other comments on this post talking about why they like the mini.
New Siri and iOS notification summaries seem like it should be enough of a reason for apple to want to ship an iPad with ai hardware.
I dunno, every Boomer guy I know with disposable income seems to have settled into Big iPad, iPad mini and iPhone as their compute stack.
I think for them it's like desk/table computer (Big iPad), sofa computer (iPad mini), out&about computer (iPhone).
I know guys like this who haven't even really owned a computer-computer (MacBook or otherwise) for 5+ years.
It's $499 USD. And if it's like the previous gen it will be on sale for $399 in a year or so.
Give me somewhere to hold the thing!
It's probably just that though. If the bezels were smaller, the device would be too close to an iPhone size and cannibalize sales.
How else were they supposed to make room for the extra 4GB of RAM required to support Apple Intelligence?
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I don’t know why we put up with this regression in technology.
If you want one that can survive anything life will throw at it, look at the Sonim devices - the XP3+ (flip) or XP5+ (candybar). They're Android Go, have exceptionally good (week and a half, easily) battery life, hotspot just fine, and handle actual use a lot better than the KaiOS toys out there. Maybe 3.x is better, but KaiOS 2.x couldn't handle actual use for more than a few weeks without starting to lag, requiring you to remove texts from it so the interface wasn't glacial, and mine eventually just stopped bothering to notify me about incoming calls and texts, which is your one job... The Android Go stuff seems to actually hold up to sustained moderate use.
A) I had to manually enter captital I, apostrophe, and ‘m’ every time I wanted to write “I’m”.
B) New words (like brand and place names) displace common words in the built-in wordlist - that is, T9 gets worse the more you use it.
It was still an OK digital minimalist/detox device - the GMaps web app with voice search was good enough.
The Android Go devices you mentioned sound far better – I’m never touching KaiOS again.
Assuming you use something like WhatsApp, Facebook or something alike. Modern "feature phones" include built-in applications for messaging and calling, and you generally can't install anything custom on them.
I keep trying to get into my kindle but just can't for some reason. E-ink is nice but being able to get a nice glowing black background with white text is really nice and the page changes are so much more fluid than e-ink.
I’d love to go dumbphone and a Watch synced to an iPad at home, but this is not an option.
I've never found a compelling use case where I'd willingly buy another Apple watch.
Buy a Garmin watch, battery life measured in weeks, and you’ll never have to re-enter your pin again because it moved on your wrist. You’ll still get great fitness tracking though and also notifications if you choose to sync them.
I used to leave the house with just my watch and it was great - I could read and send text messages, email, even take calls on my watch and have everything synced up to my phone at home. You can even download music to it and pair it to your airpods.
The missing piece here is just having a dumb phone - somehow I think that with some ingenuity you might be able to something that serves 80% of your needs here or something like that.
Also at least for the Galaxy Fold, when folded the phone is narrow enough to use one-handed and hold securely.
The fingerprint reader isn't accurate enough so I use pattern lock for NFC payments. Texting on a 3" screen isn't much fun either, but I don't like texting anyway. At least it manages to run FUTO voice keyboard (whisper based) fast enough.
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I bought a Dell laptop in 2007 and I was able to "deselect" Windows and it actually had reduced the price. I could do that in the third world and online and in 2007 (again!). I also got home repair in not a tier 1 city of that third world country. I think we went degradingly backwards from there.
You don't realize how much it matters until it does, and then it changes everything. Always having to carry an external drive just because my email takes 150gb of the 256gb MacBook storage is even more annoying than windows puting candy crush saga on the start menu.
https://youtu.be/apEKAY11NQs?t=328
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And no, virtual numbers like Google Voice are often (but not always) blocked.
Original Huawei mate x and the new trifold does what I'd like. But then again... Huawei so can't in US lol.
TouchID is good for fast and reliable unlock.
The thing holding me back from going iPad Mini instead of iPhone was Apple Watch needs the iPhone (for some reason you can't use an iPad or Mac). Not an issue anymore. But now I rely on the amazing 16 Pro camera (with Halide shooting RAW) to mostly replace my mirrorless RX1, so yet another reason to stay iPhone.
Dual? I guess some of the iPhone 16 models might have 7-8 of them by now. (I have not checked the whole 16 lineup yet, they have not bumped up the lens count, or have they?). My old 14 has 2 though. Yup, just checked - it's two. I guess it must be like two plane engines. If one is broken the other will work (I also guess/hope that's how plane engines work).
> iPhone Mini anymore, which is what I'm carrying now
I tried. The battery was atrocious. To make the battery last till early or kinda late evening I had to actively not use the phone, so I finally gave in and moved to the smallest iPhablet i.e iPhone 14 at that time (actually there was 15 as well but I guess the only difference for me between the two was the price difference). It's been said iPhone Mini 13 was the last of the small phone lineage and there will be no more.
Please tell me why people do this.
I still think they should support it anyway, even if only for three apps at a time on the primary display. iPadOS is weirdly bifurcated into two different window management strategies (Split View vs. Stage Manager) based on what device you bought, which is confusing. They should be expanding Stage Manager to as many devices as possible.
it allows you to enable stage manager on an ipad mini without problems and without needing to jailbreak or similar :). the only gotcha is, that the ipad mini doesn't support more than 1080p output, therefore, if you connect a 4k screen it will remain blank.
would love to know if the ipad mini 7 now supports 4k - would actually be a meaningful upgrade then.
Can you expand on that? It seems to support DisplayPort over USB-C, and there are a number of 1st and 3rd party adapters that have DP out, power in, and a USB2.0 plug for your other devices. What does “properly” docking it look like?
I also don’t get the complaint about the A-series chip. What does an M1 unlock in iPadOS that the A17 doesn’t?
Obviously these aren't directly comparable products but neither are iPads and budget laptops, and Apple asks $750 for a model with equivalent storage and a cellular modem. For a lot of people the screen probably is perfectly adequate but I can also see why some potential buyers would be pretty disappointed given the price point, especially since unlike the air apple doesn't even offer an upsell option at this size.
If you check Apple's comparison, at least on that overview, it seems they changed only the processor, networking, that HDR thingy on the camera, and... that's all. Everything else is the same.
Would it be a sweeter spot without those restrictions?
I hate that I can’t code on my iPad Pro.
"Intelligence", like magic, has vague and diffuse enough meaning that there's basically no chance of it being actual fraud.
high refresh rate = "Promotion"
vibrating phone = "Taptic Engine"
there are probably more. and calling AR "spatial computing" seems similar though I don't think its completely a made up marketing term
Autopilot is more henious I think because it was actually marketed as autopilot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
Gave me the dotcom vibes big time.
I was underwhelmed reading the link about the upcoming Intelligence features, but I put myself into the shoes of my dad and thought... well I guess that's a good starting point.
For anyone who thinks the pencil on a 60Hz screen is "great", you need to try it on an iPad Pro next time you're in the apple store. You'll see the difference between the "ink" trailing and lagging, and actually drawing as you move the nib.