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Someone was complaining to me that Apple took a long time to add 120 Hz displays to phones. I didn't even know what my iPhone had, turns out it's 60 Hz cause it's a 12 mini. I've used 120 Hz displays before. Cannot tell the difference.

I'm sure there is a point of diminishing returns for display refresh rates, but I can tell you from experience that it is definitely higher than 60hz. 90hz feels meaningfully smoother (on a Steam deck), and 120/144hz (on a desktop monitor in my case) feels smoother than that. Even mouse input latency is perceptibly lower. I've never used a display faster than 144hz but I honestly would not be surprised to discover that one can still tell the difference well past 144hz.

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.

> I can barely get the regular people in my life to nice anything above 30 hz or turning off motion smoothing. I really don't see how any of this stuff matters for most people

"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.

I think Apple has held off 120 Hz for so long precisely because the average person gets a bit of a jolt of "this device is fast, it runs so smooth compared to..." they can't quite immediately place until someone explains it's the refresh rate.

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 would be surprised if >10% of people didn't notice a difference between 60Hz and 120Hz.

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

You don't have to know what Hz is to see that scrolling on some devices is smooth and on other (coug..Apple) devices is choppy. 60Hz feels like a decade old phone.

I think it only really matters for gamers, but seriously, who's gaming on an iPad?! Use a PC or console!

Nobody ever wanted a >60Hz display, but once you've used one it's hard to go back. It's like having a higher-performance car. You're now stuck with paying more just for baseline happiness.

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

Even on the 120Hz displays, you can choose to cap them to 60Hz in settings.

This tradeoff doesn’t exist.

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.

Phones use VRR displays, they don't always scale up all the way to 120Hz, only when justified by the content.

the irony is that 120hz screens are actually 1-120hz vs constant 60hz which makes it more battery efficient most of the time except for when you're scrolling

What's magical about 60 there? I'd naively think you'd just want VRR and some power saving render rate behavior rather than a fixed target framerate equal to the max framerate for all types of content all the time. The latter gives you neither good power saving nor good experience in most combinations.

I think you missed the point of their comment. The point is they are reducing features (marginal cost difference for them) to provide a worse experience for a cheaper model. I'm pretty sure it's less complicated to have a shared manufacturing process with fewer SKUs than to have two separate displays (if they're even different and not just software locked).

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.

> I suspect they are going to drip feed it through their products as a cheap spec bump (vs adding extra RAM or storage).

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

Or this will be an anomaly and they'll drop the base iPhone and keep the E model for the new base, the Air, the Pro and now the Duo.

Sure, but the parent comment is saying the “matter of time” should be in the past. I wouldn’t buy a 60hz device today.

Apple introduced Tandem OLED there is a difference most of the PC world is still using single OLED with all its shortcomings along with Thunderbolt 4.

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, deep blacks will look great in the next Avengers movie.

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.)

I think another thing to keep in mind is that there’s probably an element of sensory adaptation at play here. Like when you wear a watch: you notice it at first, and then you don’t notice it on your wrist anymore.

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.

I'm one of those who can't spot a difference. I've tried to with the mouse trick or scrolling and I just can't see it. I can see the difference between 30fps and 60fps but anything north of 60fps is imperceptible to me. Maybe it's from a lifetime of gaming on toaster specs where I'd scarcely break 25fps.

Why? Reference monitors in the production industry aren't.

I can, easily, wouldn’t feel the cost in any way.

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.

It's the top image on the product page: https://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/

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.

Definitely an odd choice. Especially when two images later has it again

The usual narrative is that Apple are meticulous, therefore it is only proper that we assume they did this on purpose.

It always reminds me of the imac from 15 or so years ago when they were touting how thin the imac was.

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

woah - that's pretty shocking to me actually. in the past they generally have just used flattering angles. This is downright deception.

It's still very strange how much work goes into the materials for the case and the ergonomics and weight of holding the devices without a case just to assume everyone will put it in a case. I'm with you on iPads, they get too heavy/thick for their primary uses once in a case. The phones I sort of get but I still think it ruins a lot of the aesthetic choices they make about the case design.

Nah it’s just easier to pick up a phone when one edge is higher than the other.

Half the time their mid-year fresh is just a new color, with a huge marketing push. If everyone has a case, colors become a moot point.

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 correct answer. The camera bump is intentional and so is building phones that aren't resilient to drops out of the box. What do you mean I can't have a phone with rubber bumpers on the corners?

Would you also like the extra weight of such a device?

what premium would you pay for this? asking for a friend.

A surprising amount of people use the back camera for document scanning.

I use it quite often for scanning QR codes.

To be fair, the iPad mini is a way better form-factor for camera use than any of the big iPads. I think the only time I've ever used the rear camera on the 12" iPad was to scan a document...

I've seen asshats at concerts holding their iPads up to record. Bad enough when people hold their phones up, but this was next level.

WAT. Just because you do not does not mean you get to dictate how others can use it. I know lots of people that use the rear camera on iPads. I'm one of them.

apple literally uses batteries as thermal mass.

Not sure about the iPad Mini, but I've really only seen the bigger iPads with a case. There's just so much screen to damage, and you do really want some kind of way to prop up the bigger iPads. I very rarely remove my iPad Pro from its keyboard case.

It looks like 1:1 iPhone copy minus camera bump.

Then just remove the camera in return for nothing. Less weight and a slimmer form!

Looking at my now "old" ipad mini 2024: you might want to delete that comment - and google picturesearch a bit ;)

A lot of their devices do that, but I doubt there is space in the iPad mini bump to fit anything.

The big examples are iPhone Air and iMac.

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

Like nitrogen and oxygen gas that would take up the extra space inside?

The extra volume can be air like it is in most consumer electronics.

That's the thing - I genuinely don't understand the user or usage Venn diagram : when and who will 1. Have an expensive ipad with them and require a good big camera, but 2. Not have an equivalently competent phone with them?

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 :-})

iPhone Air is leaps and bounds better (source: owned 13 Mini)

I kinda feel that way too, but I can see why 3% of iphone sales wasn’t a compelling case at apple.

I see what you did there!

It's especially bad if you're non-American with multiple TVs.

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.

In Europe, it’s closer to $400, which is downright insulting for what is essentially a cheap smartphone without a screen or battery.

I've thought a lot about that actually. I have a number of hardware purchases I'd like to make but I'm delaying due to the insane prices. That said, would I give up LLMs for the prior prices? No. Prices will come down eventually once more factories come online (it's just slow to bring up a new factory/fab, especially for RAM) and LLMs are such an awesome tool that I'll take the short-term pain of higher hardware.

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It's part of it. Another part of the reason is patent related royalties that they have to pay to the likes of Qualcomm, Nokia, etc. for any device that has a working 5G stack inside of it. Apple actually has had their own 5G modem implementation for a few years now; they clearly have the technology to deliver this with a clean full in house chip design.

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.

> The buyer is also signing up for a monthly payment. So clearly they have the cash to make an “extra monthly payment” or two up front.

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).

In 2012, that iPad mini ran YouTube videos at the same resolution as today but without ads!

On the plus side, devices are designed to last longer, be more repairable and be updated for longer than they were in 2012.

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.

Oh I long for the days when every 2 years prices for compute FELL.

Not really unfair, as the basic use case is still the same for either model.

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.

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Right. The prices are up for Nvidia’s benefit (and Micron, Sandisk by extension).

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.

It doesn't, capitalism is the free association without coercsion. When the government can mandate that you cannot sell certain GPUs to customers in specific areas or that your model is too scary and you must shut it down and can give or take government contracts that are work hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and the federal reserve will bail out the banks If they make mistakes, you have a crony capitalist environment that has very little to do with the free market.

> How does AI explain

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

  1) ...

The iPad mini is not a mini version of the base model iPad. It's more or less a scaled down iPad Air.

When did Apple last refresh that? (not a rhetorical question sorry!)

Apple was "greedy" before too and were able to sell it cheaper. So obviously they're being impacted by increased storage/memory/whatever prices.

I wish this was somehow listed as a separate line item with the price, assuming prices will normalize at some point. I don’t want these prices to be considered the new normal, even after memory prices come down. I think transparency in the pricing would help with that.

Luxury inflation is more than normal inflation, but this isn't a luxury even though it's not necessary, and the price isn't going up due to the steady cause of inflation (money creation).

Computers are a “luxury good” now?

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> Only Apple can properly replace these screens and pair the parts

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

Yup. Had an MacBook Air. Slight water damage near charging port. Laptop functioned correctly on AC power. Extensive battery diagnostics: Healthy. Just the charging circuit saying "go ahead, charge device"...

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.

You mean that the corner was damaged, not that a cat also chewed on the corner of your MBP, right? I'm still in shock that a cat would chew on glass and metal enough to damage it - two cats doing it is too much in one day!

Yep, I've long been envious of my wife's iPad Mini for the form factor, but my eyes want to scream when using 60hz refresh.

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.

I really dont understand the hardon for refresh rates.

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.

you don't need promotion if you're going to use it for movies, but OLED is a huge improvement in this regard.

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.

I think the Mini's primary use case that benefits a 120hz screen is art apps, but the artists I know would prefer OLED over 120hz. For entertainment, video is video, and games on tablets often lock to 30 by default to preserve battery life.

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

Shouldn't it rather drive you to a Samsung Fold?

Since when have we established "thinner and lighter" equals "better"?

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.

Everyone and everything is for sale for the right price.

I think there will be be app integration, but hopefully no App Store. We know that apps can work on HomeView using CarPlay. Not sure that is sufficient long term, perhaps just to jump start things. They may need to enhance that library to allow more kinds of apps to work with HomeView.

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.

Old people

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

That was a joke lol Tipping culture is so insane in North America

What does twice the "neural engine" get me?

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

Nano texture was the entire reason I upgraded to an iPad Pro M4. The camera on the long edge is a major regression as far as I am concerned, however. The only drawback is fingerprints are harder to remove,you really need that special microfiber cloth or one of the cheap Chinese clones.

LCD iPhones defo had this. I thought it was to do with panel supplier

For nighttime viewing with my Pixel 8 Pro (OLED), I wish I could make the screen even dimmer at night. The extra dim mode barely does anything.

Can definitely attest to this. When I was doing my PPL I had an iPad that had a built-in cellular modem loaded with ForeFlight for GPS positioning mounted to the inside of the cessna's window.

I predict it’ll be less than 6 million a year at these ludicrous prices.

By putting the A20 Pro chip in it rather than A16/A17/A18 which is on base iPads and iPhones.

Nice to have until you need to charge because you forgot about it. Tbh the only use case for me was using it to study; afterwards it collected dust.

This is it, they are media consumption devices.

Lenovo Legion Y700, Well built, a little too flashy, put it in the case if you mind.

Samsung Galaxy Tab A11 X130 with 8GB of RAM costs around 220 EUR, I haven't tested that one though.

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.

The Google Pixel Tablet can be degoogled with GrapheneOS, but it was discontinued last month. It also does not have cellular connectivity. But it’s an excellent device, and the one I am using as part of my effort to wean myself off dependency on fast-enshittifying Apple.

Not being able to receive phone calls is the single greatest feature of the iPad.

10-20 billion dollars and 2-3 years, witch is nothing to the Chinese or a company like Apple or TSMC if the will is there.

Maybe with enough money. Terafab ~ Q3 2027

Pro-motion, 120FPS display.