Part of me applauds a valiant attempt to keep the iPad mini relevant instead of killing it off, as has seemed plausible at various stages in the product’s history. But another part thinks Apple has just responded to competition from the automobile industry by building the world’s fanciest horse and cart.
As I discussed briefly in our live blog for this week’s Apple announcements, the iPad mini’s great problem is that the ground has moved beneath its feet. When the device came out, an argument could be made that it was the best way for Apple fans to view movies and play games on the go. It was relatively cheap, portable, powerful, and above all delivered an experience you couldn’t get with any other Apple product. But that hasn’t been the case for some time now.
The iPad mini has a lot of the features of an iPhone Duo when opened.
Take the phablet, as we used to call very large smartphones before products of that form factor became normal and even expected. They threaten mini tablets because they approach the same problem in a more versatile way. Yes, an iPad mini is cheaper than an iPhone 18 Pro Max. But the latter is also a phone. It’s more portable, more powerful, offers a very respectable 6.9-inch screen that’s great for games and movies, and it’s the only mobile device you need. Why buy an iPad mini and a phone when you can get both in one package?
But this year the iPad mini’s situation became even more desperate with the launch of the iPhone Duo. The Duo has its issues, but beating any iPad mini in a head-to-head is not one of them. It’s just straight up better: infinitely more portable in its folded form, very nearly as large-screened when unfolded, and vastly more powerful and versatile. A world containing the iPhone Duo is not one that’s friendly to the iPad mini, which is essentially a Duo you can’t close.
Does the A20 Pro update change the equation in any meaningful way? Thinness is always nice, the mini needed an up-to-date processor for future-proofing if nothing else, and the OLED screen is the sort of quality-of-life upgrade you can market around. But it’s still fundamentally a product whose niche got swallowed up by something more exciting. It still feels kind of obsolete. It’s still a knife at a gunfight.
Can the iPad mini succeed? I think so. But my advice, perhaps counterintuitively, would be for Apple to embrace the qualities and characteristics that make it different from the bigger iPhones and the more powerful iPads. It needs to be cheaper, not thinner. It needs to be tougher, not more powerful. (The new model’s water and dust resistance is a bigger deal, in my opinion.) It needs to become the iPad equivalent of the old iPhone SE, by delivering an old-fashioned experience for the niche audience that doesn’t want the newer and more expensive version.
