In Praise of the iPad mini 7
Adam Chandler (Reddit, Amazon):
Right now, the iPad mini with an A17 Pro and 8Gb of RAM is $399 through some retail partners.
[…]
Something surprising happened since picking this up. Following setup, I’d start casually grabbing it and carrying it around the house. The mini fits in my cargo shorts and pants pockets of my mostly-outdoors-hiking-pants that have larger pockets. It fits in the tank bag of my motorcycle and I can hold it with one hand with my thumb and index finger around the backside then interact with my other hand.
The display actually has a higher pixels per inch than two of my other devices at 326 PPI (MBP @ 254, iPhone at 460, iPad at 264). So clarity of this display compared to my OLED iPad Pro or MiniLED MacBook Pro is actually more crisp and I just wish it was slightly brighter outside or had a nano-texture display.
I found triaging emails, reading RSS feeds, Instapaper stories or Reddit to be most of what I navigate to. Anything that may prompt typing like MS Teams, Slack, Safari or Messages I avoid because I’m not prepared to thumb through when I can literally get up and go to my MacBook Pro and compose the message even faster.
For my purposes, the “pro” stuff just isn’t there on the iPad, and I’m not sure it ever will be. The iPad Pro with its keyboard is heavier and more expensive than a MacBook Air, yet less capable. But there’s certainly room for something between an iPhone and a Mac. For me, this has mostly been my Kindle, because its weight and display are better for reading than anything Apple offers. But if you want to do more than reading, the iPad mini is a good mix of capabilities, size, and price. Apple doesn’t update it very often, so the time to buy is right when it comes out or when there’s a third-party price drop like this.
To me, if you’re trying to use a keyboard with an iPad, you’ve failed. It’s better to lean into what it’s good at. For years, Apple tried to resist the idea of an iPad as an iPhone with a larger screen. But the apps have trended in that direction, and I think that’s actually not a bad way to think of it. It’s actually what a lot of people want.
Previously:
- iOS 19 More Like macOS?
- iPad (11th Generation)
- iPad Air (M3, 7th Generation)
- Gemmell Is Back to Mac
- iPad mini (7th Generation)
- Galaxy Fold Review
- My iPad mini (Retina)
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Funny, I won't be upgrading my iPad Mini 6 to a 7, because I seldom use it since I upgraded to an iPhone 16 Plus. Before the larger screen, I hardly used my iPhone (about 8 minutes per day according to Screen Time), not any more.
I expect the folding iPhone (or a folding Google Pixel equipped with GrapheneOS, as I am fed up with Apple's hubris) will replace the small tablet completely. I still use my 13" iPad Pro as you need the real estate for many things like comics or movies.
