Weird that they’re just dumping it on the market, midweek. Not even waiting for the rumored November release announcement.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Probably because there is absolutely nothing new to announce except the upgraded processor and support for the Apple Pencil Pro.
And that’s just fine. They don’t need to have an expensive release event for every point upgrade.
apple said hey i heard you like copilot so here's an ipad built for ai that costs even more than copilot
Have an older early 5th-Gen one, with the touch gestures starting to flake out, requiring reboots every day or two. The mini form-factor is perfect for reading, browsing, and watching video. It's large enough to show two ebook pages, but light enough to hold up when lying in bed and not worry about it smashing your face if you nod off.
Peculiar to see that there is an iPhone 15 Pro chip in another, new device. Wasn’t the industry consensus that Apple wanted to move on from the costly first generation N3 node as quickly as possible? For the Mx chips, everything seemed like the M3 generation (also on first gen N3) was just a very shortlived in between stopgap solution with everything seemingly shifting to M4.
I was surprised until I saw the spec sheet. The A17 Pro in the iPad mini has a 5-core GPU as opposed to the 6-core GPU the iPhone 15 Pro has with the chip.
So the iPad mini features a binned version of the A17 Pro chip, and Apple likely has quite a few of them piled up as they only ever sold fully functional A17 Pro chips so far. The N3B process didn't have the best of yields to chips with partial defects would've likely been quite common.
Combine that with the likely lower volume sales of the mini compared to larger iPads (and obviously iPhones) and Apple can probably sell the mini for a couple of years without needing to produce new A17 Pro chips.
So it actually makes a lot of sense. Makes me wonder what they'll put in the next regular iPad though.
Probably their way to get rid of extra stock.
This is it. The Pro in this new Mini has a disabled GPU core. They’re offloading low-binned leftover chips.
Excel product through and through
Meaning you can only tell the difference when you look at a comparative spreadsheet?
Meaning that each spec was a decision by controllers
Comptrollers?
How dare they release another product without 120fps
I just upgraded my six-year-old phone and 120hz on a phone is BEAUTIFUL.
I loved my old mini 2, but the forced obsolescence is bullshit and I’ll never buy another iPad.
What forced obsolescence are you talking about? The mini 2 is an 11 year old device that received feature updates for 6 years and security updates for 10 years. Seems fair to me and is probably more than most Android tablets would give you.
The same apps I always used no longer work because of OS requirements. The “download older version” feature is extremely hit and miss (mostly miss).
The device works fine and is functionally useless because Apple said so. That’s not cool with me. Android might be just as bad, I don’t know — I’m sticking with FOSS mostly these days and just don’t have a working tablet anymore.