The Third Place ➹

The reviews for the 2024 iPad mini with A17 Pro are coming out, and Federico’s is, as usual, very positive and optimistic, but IMHO both him and Jason Snell stray a bit too far into the realm of fantasy and try to draw a dotted line to a future foldable iPhone, which I think is a bit of a stretch.

A foldable (any foldable) would not replace the iPad mini neither functionally neither price-wise (when it comes, it’s going to be the most expensive iPhone ever sold), and would be in stark contrast to Apple’s current approach at building the iPad mini out of binned parts–the current iPad mini is, as someone else put it (besides David Pierce, who also generally agrees with this sentiment), “a product that only a supply chain would love”, and very much a staple of the Tim Cook era.

And that is just not the Apple I grew up with.

I do agree with Federico that the iPad mini has always been my “third place” away from the phone and laptop–but for me, it’s actually the first thing I pick up every day and a device I always travel with instead of my iPad Pro, and as such I think this upgrade does it a major disservice by having a gimped, binned surplus CPU and lacking a few key Pro-like features (like Stage Manager on an external display).

I would even go so far as to claim that the iPad Pro (not the mini) is the true outlier in Apple’s product range–Apple has crippled iPads so much that having Pro features on the mini and using a laptop instead of the Pro actually makes much more sense–I could do without my Pro, but I can’t do without my mini, and that is exactly why this particular upgrade cycle sucks so much.