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.

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 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.

Whether the hardware can keep up with Liquid Glass and push 120 frames a second is a different story, of course.

It's probably not actually as hard to go back as we think it is, but holding on to stuff is in our genes.

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.

The iPhone sells way more units than the iPad, so it makes sense that it's not a feature for the iPad mini yet.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 would assume, however, that they didn't "fake" it - that they instead chose a filming position and lens such that camera was obscured behind the edge of the device (the edge facing the viewer is the far side from the camera). Bit of trickery for sure though.

In reality the back was curved, and they took pictures from an angle that only showed off the edge of the screen and not how far back it curved

before you vote down, this is not a serious response

I also don’t think I’ve ever seen an Apple exec use a case, as it would imply the phones are durable and a case is needed, which they don’t want to convey. (Bumpers for antenna-gate aside)

The big examples are iPhone Air and iMac.

From my experience, the iPhone bumps are a lot more noticeable than their iPad siblings.

Don't get me wrong, I understand it happens - back when I did wedding photography, one of my massive pet peeves were the uncles and grandparents who stepped into the aisle with their massive tablets just as bride is starting her walk... But I do not understand it at all :-/.

I'd absolutely happily completely kill the rear facing tablet camera. I've had at least a dozen android and ipad tablets and I genuinely don't think I took a single photo with them - it'd feel weird and awkward and so ostentious.

(As always as a consumer, clearly I'm in minority here :-})

e.g. I've got three screens in my house (office TV, living room TV, basement projector) in Canada — upgrading to the latest Apple TV on each of them would cost me $1,287.

But any device that has that embedded would have some royalty overhead added to the BOM. Which is why they've always had ipads with and without 5G and have so far never really bothered with adding this on laptops (which actually would make a lot of sense from a technical point of view). Operators would probably love that because it's a nice up-sell opportunity on monthly subscriptions. And with soft sims there would not be a need for a hardware sim card.

For the same reason, you don't see this feature on many other laptops either. There are a few obviously but it's a less common feature than you'd expect given how important good connectivity is to most laptop users.

I know of pilots who buy the +Cellular simply for GNSS and do not get a separate plan.

Charging more for the C-series hardware is understandable, but if there's enough of a 'transistor budget' it would be nice for the GNSS functionality to be more universal (since the N-series seems to be going into everything).

The upfront cost of a device is less important than the total cost of ownership, which highly depends on the lifespan of the device. An ipad that lasts 2.5 years needs to be half the price of one that lasts 5 years.

A toilet from a hundred years ago in the same product tier serves the same function as one today. Old models were also more expensive when adjusted for inflation, but today's toilets can tackle more turds with less water.

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.

  12 reasons why the iPad Mini is $250 more expensive than iPad 11-inch:

  1) ...

It makes me think of a Bento-box laptop with a foldable keyboard and a tri-fold display, where both the display and the keyboard unfold when you open the computer. Extremely thick, but a very small footprint when closed.

I'm not sure whether that's amazing or something that'll bankrupt any company that tries to sell it with longer than a 3-day warranty.

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

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.

This is a major reason why I'm ponying up the dough for the iPhone Duo.

The iPhone Duo is as close as we're getting to the iPad Mini Pro we've all been asking for.

This isn't even a "people dont see that fast".

It just, it seems more like a perceptual addiction to a trivial feature. A penis measuring contest more than a useful advancement of technology.

the price is a bit high, but that's all apple products.

i do think this means a lot of android tablets on this form factor are going to start coming out with OLED screens as well though, which is good, as they will be much cheaper.

For the iPad Air (especially the 13" model!) I agree 100%.

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.

Right now, I think they are bringing out an MVP and waiting to see how people react to it and what kinds of things turn out to be useful. When they launched the Watch, no one was sure what kinds of things we would want to do on it. It took a while to see what was useful. I think a model where apps on your phone provide HomeView widgets like the Watch might be better than writing apps specifically for such a device.

I’m buying one for my parents and in-laws

They have iPads

iPads are never charged and in some random spot in their being empty houses

This will make sure my kids can FaceTime their grandparents whenever they want

That’s worth $300 to make my kids and my parents happy

For about the same cost, I can get a used M5 chip with both a Neural Engine™ and GPU cores each with Neural Accelerators™

Another alternative is the Lenovo Legion Tab TB321FU, 12GB RAM, 256GB, but this one costs 500 EUR.

But you are right, there are not a lot of alternatives with 8GB RAM out there. Most Android Tablets with a screen size of 8-9" have 4GB, which would make them slow.