Is it a cost saving measure / sneaky margin increaser, or what might be the motivation?

Edit:

Touch interference is a good idea. Still, from the picture, it looks like the bezel could be half as thick and work well. Sorry to be such a stickler, I am genuinely curious if Apple is chasing better margins, the best feasible UX, or something else.

Could it be that since this device is only $650 USD, it isn't expensive enough to warrant a premium display? (Like the iPhone SE https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/)

If so, I wish there was a fancier "Pro" model with premium components. IIRC, I paid $1000 for my first iPad, it was the first super high-resolution one back in 2012. Perhaps there aren't enough customers who are sensitive to wasted screen real estate on an 8-inch device.. and FWIW I have noticed a constant stream of toddlers pacified by iPad Minis whenever I'm at Costco.

Also, this is an LCD screen. The substrate is rigid. An OLED, like on the iPhone is on a flexible substrate and can be bent at the edges to connect to the circuit board. That lets you put the screen closer to the edge.

There is a really weird vibe that some folks put out trying to body shame over the internet.

Smaller hands are likely to struggle to one hand control the Pro Max.

> Smaller hands are likely to struggle to one hand control the Pro Max.

Couldn't agree more.

without jobs it's just a matter of time they go back to being "just an expensive dell" like before

That very behavior was troublesome for Apple in the past, twice.

Two times Steve Jobs swooped in and saved Apple from Dell-ifying themselves. Twice.

Since Job's demise, Apple has relentlessly marched toward Dellification once more. The immediate revenue is tantalizing, it's the dilution of ones own market that ends up killing the golden goose, and the eggs they lay.

The one overarching success of the Tim Cook era is ruthlessly pursuing consumer lock in at all costs.

In reality this may be to (1) to keep costs down and (2) to distance the iPad mini from the more premium iPhone Pro Max.

All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for? iPads are mostly used for media consumption, no matter how Apple wants to position them. Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware, but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads that can make use of “Apple Intelligence” (the silliest moniker since “Spatial Computing” and “Retina Display”).

The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless. Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube. What could have made a difference is a folding display. I think the iPad mini would have been the ideal candidate for that.

Hi, it me.

I have an iPhone 13 Mini that will have to be pried from my cold dead hands because it's about as big a phone as I'm willing to carry (I'd still rather have the 5s form factor.)

I also have an iPad Mini that supplements it perfectly.

Really don't want anything larger, because I like to handle it with one hand while walking or I'm propping it up in a tight space like when I'm watching a how-to video while doing a home-improvement project or working on my car.

There is absolutely no way I'd buy a phone as gigantic as a Max.

Honestly not sure how people walk around with those things.

It's not gigantic for everyone to be fair. I'm 6′1″ with largish hands I suppose and the Max is a single hand device for me. Small devices look comical in my hands. I was one of those very well served by Apple starting to make larger devices, and it's when I shifted over from Android full time to iOS devices. (I was very fond of the early generation Galaxy Note devices prior to that.)

> Honestly not sure how people walk around with those things.

The same way as I do anything of that size. It goes in my pocket or i'm holding it?

I get where you are coming from those because my partner has a much smaller 13 line device and we've done some basic testing and like you, shifting to a Max sized device...well, its just not very likely. My phone looks absolutely jumbo once you put it in her teeny hands.

I think preference probably plays a bigger role than size. I see a lot of tiny people manhandling pros and maxes too.

Why do I need to carry around a huge screen to text, make phone calls and take pictures?

At the time, many Apple users claimed no one wanted larger phones and that Apple’s size was perfect. I disagreed and voted with my wallet. For me, there are no downsides to a larger device—I can still use it one-handed, it fits in my pockets, and going smaller wouldn’t make it any more portable or usable.

For others, it’s the opposite. A smaller phone may be easier to handle or fit better in pockets or everyday carry. So I agree there should be different sizes to meet different needs, including smaller options if the market supports them. Among my circle, smaller phones tend to be the preference for those who primarily use their device for calls and texts. Anything beyond that, like browsing, moves to a tablet. These people are generally in their mid-30s to mid-40s.

Interestingly, the ‘non-techy’ people I know with larger phones say it’s because they use a popsocket or view their phone more as a computer than a phone. They’re willing to trade off size for a bigger screen. Many of them don’t own another personal computing device, aside from maybe a tablet. They’re typically in their 20s to 30s.

I feel like I’m part of a shrinking group that still uses both a laptop and a desktop as my primary computing environments.

and so I've been a little disappointed with how these devices keep getting bigger and bigger. I was pretty happy with the size of the Pixel 3

I think I like to be able to access the whole screen comfortably with one hand, not fumbling it about. easy to manipulate, easy to pocket. the Pixel 8 shrunk a bit over its predecessors so I nabbed that, and it's probably at or just over the limit for me, size wise

Everything you said about large hands rings true for small hands and the mini form factor, but instead of just looking silly it's a hinderance.

We need both form factors. What I don't think we need is the weird middle size (current regular iPhone size), but I'm sure that's probably the one most people actually want if they could only pick one.

While the linear diagonal size of the screens are not so much different, the area of the iPad Mini is significantly larger. I ran the numbers a month or so on it when someone was making the same claim of equivalence. I don’t recall the specifics now but I think the iPad screen had at least 60% more area. That is significant.

“ Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware”

It would be hard for Apple to put in a chipset now that didn’t support AI. All of their SOCs for the past 10 years have had neural processors. This A17 Pro has 8GB of RAM. All of their recent SOCs have the 8GB of RAM needed to run AI. Why not?

Edit: For the non-pilots reading this, it's also worth noting that the most popular flying app by far for general aviation at least, ForeFlight, is iOS only. So your choices are generally small iPad or big iPad, and a lot of people don't like big iPad in a small airplane cockpit.

Who is any iPad for? They’re nice screens attached to good processors.

I bring mine to work to either read or watch videos over my lunch break. Don’t want the full size of a regular iPad. Don’t want to use my work laptop with my personal service accounts like YouTube, Netflix, kindle, etc.

And while the Mini is small, it’s still a substantial screen size increase over using my regular sized iPhone for that purpose.

You know, you could just read all the other comments on this post talking about why they like the mini.

New Siri and iOS notification summaries seem like it should be enough of a reason for apple to want to ship an iPad with ai hardware.

You mean the dedicated neural chip they've been gushing over for half a decade saying how it's an amazing dedicated chip for exactly this kind of work?

Due to the aspect ratios, there are significant differences in viewable area. It is not a "small" difference at all. Once you add in the ability to deal with specific aspect ratio content, the difference becomes even larger.

https://displaywars.com/6,9-inch-d%7B19,5x9%7D-vs-8,3-inch-d...

> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?

Not for everyone I would suggest. But I have people in my circle who will be very pleased. As they use a Mini as their phone/portable machine out of the house. They have little keyboard cases and use VOIP services for communication.

> but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads

Part of the appeal for most people is the seamless usage of features and functionalities across their sweet of products. People expect to be able to pick up where they left of, and have access to the same functionality as they largely do on the rest of the devices.

It's nice even if something is not your primary productivity device, to be able to execute or perform things on them if that's what happens to be in front of you at the time.

I know children who study with their iPad minis and prefer them over notebooks. This isn’t necessarily a pro-Apple statement, but rather a reflection on how different user groups may engage with devices in ways that are cognitively distinct from what we discuss here on HN.

There are also comments here about specific use cases, like pilots using tools such as ForeFlight. While this kind of usage may not drive overall demand, it highlights how certain groups find unique value in the iPad mini for their specialized needs.

I dunno, every Boomer guy I know with disposable income seems to have settled into Big iPad, iPad mini and iPhone as their compute stack.

I think for them it's like desk/table computer (Big iPad), sofa computer (iPad mini), out&about computer (iPhone).

I know guys like this who haven't even really owned a computer-computer (MacBook or otherwise) for 5+ years.

The only complaint I have with it is that it only supports one profile but I think that applies to all ipads

My single use case is reading research papers. I also do that on pc but the ipad mini is great to take a paper and read it entirely without distractions and with the ability to take handwritten notes. That was a nice combo with the lab couch when I was in PhD. Also the fact it can be held in one hand, especially nice when presenting or walking.

I really wanted something that'more Kindle-sized, which the iPad mini seems to be, which is the perfect form factor for one handed usability.

Bigger is not always better, but it’s almost always costlier and less convenient.

How else were they supposed to make room for the extra 4GB of RAM required to support Apple Intelligence?

So you have somewhere to actually hold the bloody thing.

Bezelless gadgets look great in photos but are impractical as fuck to handle.

While manufacturers can theoretically produce custom-sized LCD panels, it's more economical and efficient to stick to standard sizes that align with their production lines. Producing custom-sized panels can involve retooling. Choosing a standard size also ensures greater availability.

For a low cost product, I don't see why Apple would mess around with LCD sizes.

Still, this is just a guess. Only Apple knows for sure.

Apple's logic:- saving private photos on the cloud is good for privacy, while doing AI computation on the cloud is somehow bad for it ?

If you want one that can survive anything life will throw at it, look at the Sonim devices - the XP3+ (flip) or XP5+ (candybar). They're Android Go, have exceptionally good (week and a half, easily) battery life, hotspot just fine, and handle actual use a lot better than the KaiOS toys out there. Maybe 3.x is better, but KaiOS 2.x couldn't handle actual use for more than a few weeks without starting to lag, requiring you to remove texts from it so the interface wasn't glacial, and mine eventually just stopped bothering to notify me about incoming calls and texts, which is your one job... The Android Go stuff seems to actually hold up to sustained moderate use.

A) I had to manually enter captital I, apostrophe, and ‘m’ every time I wanted to write “I’m”.

B) New words (like brand and place names) displace common words in the built-in wordlist - that is, T9 gets worse the more you use it.

It was still an OK digital minimalist/detox device - the GMaps web app with voice search was good enough.

The Android Go devices you mentioned sound far better – I’m never touching KaiOS again.

Assuming you use something like WhatsApp, Facebook or something alike. Modern "feature phones" include built-in applications for messaging and calling, and you generally can't install anything custom on them.

The fingerprint reader isn't accurate enough so I use pattern lock for NFC payments. Texting on a 3" screen isn't much fun either, but I don't like texting anyway. At least it manages to run FUTO voice keyboard (whisper based) fast enough.

Is it not possible to sync MP3s to Apple Watches anymore? I have a really really old model, and I selected a few playlists on my iPhone, and when they change, the songs automatically sync to my Apple Watch.

I’d love to go dumbphone and a Watch synced to an iPad at home, but this is not an option.

I've never found a compelling use case where I'd willingly buy another Apple watch.

Integration with Fitness on Apple TV is extremely slick for HIIT and yoga.

Also, the third-party Intervals Pro app has been my go-to running app. I started with Apple+Nike since 2010 and a Fitbit Charge in 2015, but nothing let me customize my workouts as much as the Intervals app.

My watch is essential in helping me keep up. It’s on my wrist from the moment I wake till the moment I sleep, ensuring I miss nothing important. I’ve restricted notifications to medical needs and use it to log symptoms or adverse effects immediately, preventing forgetfulness which was a problem previously.

Outside of my unique use case, many people I know with a watch have stopped carrying a phone altogether. They find it freeing, as the watch gives them essential tools without the distraction of a larger device. Its limitations are a benefit, allowing them to focus on the moment and carry less.

Buy a Garmin watch, battery life measured in weeks, and you’ll never have to re-enter your pin again because it moved on your wrist. You’ll still get great fitness tracking though and also notifications if you choose to sync them.

I used to leave the house with just my watch and it was great - I could read and send text messages, email, even take calls on my watch and have everything synced up to my phone at home. You can even download music to it and pair it to your airpods.

The missing piece here is just having a dumb phone - somehow I think that with some ingenuity you might be able to something that serves 80% of your needs here or something like that.

    typeof(x) y = (typeof(x))x; // no pun intended

Also at least for the Galaxy Fold, when folded the phone is narrow enough to use one-handed and hold securely.

I keep trying to get into my kindle but just can't for some reason. E-ink is nice but being able to get a nice glowing black background with white text is really nice and the page changes are so much more fluid than e-ink.

https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...

Self control to not get distracted

I don't get this whole "Too many distractions" shtick. If you don't have the self control to swipe away from your book to sneak in a round of Angry Birds, you'll probably end up pulling your phone out every 2 minutes to check your Reddit feed

   - I almost never hold my phone to my ear
   - I don't need the dual-lens features of the new iPhones
   - Standby battery life seems up to the challenge
   - Apple doesn't offer the iPhone Mini anymore, which is what I'm carrying now. If I'm going bigger, why not actually go BIGger.

   - Not actually sure about the battery life
   - As far as I know you can't transfer your actual phone line to a Mini

Original Huawei mate x and the new trifold does what I'd like. But then again... Huawei so can't in US lol.

TouchID is good for fast and reliable unlock.

The thing holding me back from going iPad Mini instead of iPhone was Apple Watch needs the iPhone (for some reason you can't use an iPad or Mac). Not an issue anymore. But now I rely on the amazing 16 Pro camera (with Halide shooting RAW) to mostly replace my mirrorless RX1, so yet another reason to stay iPhone.

And no, virtual numbers like Google Voice are often (but not always) blocked.

Also, inertia

For anyone who thinks the pencil on a 60Hz screen is "great", you need to try it on an iPad Pro next time you're in the apple store. You'll see the difference between the "ink" trailing and lagging, and actually drawing as you move the nib.

I still think they should support it anyway, even if only for three apps at a time on the primary display. iPadOS is weirdly bifurcated into two different window management strategies (Split View vs. Stage Manager) based on what device you bought, which is confusing. They should be expanding Stage Manager to as many devices as possible.

> Update, 9/28/2021: In response to our inquiry, Apple has told us that the "jelly scroll" issue on the 6th-generation iPad mini is normal behavior for LCD screens.

> Update, 9/30/2021: An iFixit teardown suggests that the iPad mini's more noticeable scrolling issue is a byproduct of how the display controller is mounted.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/2021-ipad-mini-suffe...

FWIW, my 5th Gen Mini doesn't have this issue.

Can you expand on that? It seems to support DisplayPort over USB-C, and there are a number of 1st and 3rd party adapters that have DP out, power in, and a USB2.0 plug for your other devices. What does “properly” docking it look like?

If you check Apple's comparison, at least on that overview, it seems they changed only the processor, networking, that HDR thingy on the camera, and... that's all. Everything else is the same.

It's a tablet, not a phone. No number of cameras is going to make it into a good device for taking photos.

Would it be a sweeter spot without those restrictions?

I hate that I can’t code on my iPad Pro.

I also don’t get the complaint about the A-series chip. What does an M1 unlock in iPadOS that the A17 doesn’t?

Obviously these aren't directly comparable products but neither are iPads and budget laptops, and Apple asks $750 for a model with equivalent storage and a cellular modem. For a lot of people the screen probably is perfectly adequate but I can also see why some potential buyers would be pretty disappointed given the price point, especially since unlike the air apple doesn't even offer an upsell option at this size.

I will say though the criticism of the A-series getting hot doesn’t make sense. If the A-series gets hot, the M-series is going to be boiling in that tiny chassis.

Depends on a particular A and M chip, tho.

You don't realize how much it matters until it does, and then it changes everything. Always having to carry an external drive just because my email takes 150gb of the 256gb MacBook storage is even more annoying than windows puting candy crush saga on the start menu.

You have a very different email life than me. Is that like, all emails received in your life, or just huge attachments?

I’m afraid though that the core premise of your comment is flawed. Storage and especially memory are increasingly soldered to thin and lights. Even professional grade laptops such as the Thinkpad X1 Carbon have soldered memory.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-scourge-of-fully-soldered-...

[1] https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-gu...

[2] https://www.owc.com/solutions/aura-n2

Soldering the RAM has legitimate performance benefits, but soldering the SSD is just to save space and upsell overpriced upgrades.

Having replaceable ram is not really a marketable feature these days.

If that practice spreads to the MacBooks, you'll also need a CNC mill.

It makes sense to update the model with apple intelligence but that might not be enough for a lot of people to upgrade.

Perhaps we're looking at a device that simply will be out of lineup soon (next few years).

I do like this form factor a lot though, well, eventually we'll get foldable phones to become mainstream I hope.

What do you mean, the iPad mini has a higher ppi (326) vs iPad Air (264).

I think the issue is that, iPad OS is scaling the display to a weird resolution.

https://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/specs/

https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/specs/

And adding OLED would make it the great for nighttime reading.

So is storage and RAM but every OEM has their added vendor tax and so does Apple.

2TB Samsung pro nvme SSD is 170$, how much is 2TB Apple storage...

Same with screens.

that's fine? it's a very mature segment - medium-price small screen tablet. it hasn't even really been updated since 2021, and that was basically new case+usb-c.

My 2014 ipad air 2 is only just starting to feel old.

Can someone tell me how they're increasing their creative productivity with these outside of making illustrations?

I have a ton of ideas that I organize and illustrate, but I can't give up my pen/paper as I haven't found the killer combo yet.

I have phases where I convince myself this is true, in between switching back to a note taking app (TickTick last few yrs) and every time I go back it's because it a) has total historical recall + a search box when I want to find something and b) I already carry my phone everywhere, like the grocery store, or I'm on my laptop for work.

Papers only true benefit is focus and "zen" stuff.

the current iPad Mini is laggy compared to other iPads, and i'm not sure why. an iPhone with the same processor is not laggy at all. it becomes obvious when scrolling or opening and closing apps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size

I do love my iPad Mini to bits though. I use mine purely to read, sketch and take notes. It does not receive any notifications. I carry it almost everywhere I go.

Smart HDR uses neural image segmentation for tone mapping and other processing. In my opinion it goes way too far; trying to grab a faintly blue sky and make it as blue as possible, identifying a face and lightening any hint of a shadow, etc.

When people complain about iPhone photos looking over processed, this is why.

I've owned 8 or 10 tablets in my life and never gotten along with any of them. The Mini6 is my latest experiment, and it's my favorite, but I still find myself rarely using it.

That said, you can embiggen things like Safari browser buttons under Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Larger Text.

"We added more RAM because there's no way we could make an LLM useful in only 4GB. While we were there, we updated the CPU. Might as well.(We grabbed the A17 Pro because we were in a rush.)"

Surprised though that they don't have an option with cellular so you can have always-on data access (i.e., with a data-only plan).

Updated: my bad, it does come with cellular -- it's just not advertised on the main product page

edit: oops I mixed up A Pro and A X

Apple used to use the X suffix for bigger versions of their phone processors that went into iPads (starting with the A5X); that went away when the M-series was introduced.

And the "Pro" suffix itself doesn't seem to denote anything in particular-- there was never a non-Pro A17, and the "A17 Pro" going into the iPad Mini is itself a cut-down version of the chip that went into the iPhone 15 Pro (it has one GPU core disabled).

At this point, the only word that can be applied to it is "overdue" for anything who uses it beyond a thin client for server-side storage or a streaming service

IMO, the only thing weird here is the way the iPhone 16 demo day kept talking about these unreleased features front and center instead of the actual capabilities of the new phone. Probably that’s because the phone is so incremental and there was not much to talk about.

My money is on it being a massive failure if it ever does come out, the only thing stopping me from buying options is I don’t have a clue as to the timeline for when they’ll give up and ship whatever they have.

It's unknown how useful any of this will be in day to day use-cases.

Will full coverage screens with a software driven, virtual bezel every be a thing?

I wouldn't mind 3cm wide bezels and accordingly larger batteries.

Never heard of anyone making that but this would honestly sound like the first innovation in several years, not incremental like "GPS now finds a solution 2 seconds faster" and "the mobile data now uses 7% less energy" but something that is now possible that wasn't a feature before

They could even give it only the virtual bezel on the left and right sides, in whichever orientation you're holding it, since you don't really hold it on the top or bottom.

[*] For reference, the iPad Air with the Magic Keyboard is about as heavy as a 13" MacBook Air.

It is just such a shame they discontinued the keyboard. It makes for the perfect iPad with a full keyboard.

Creatives are getting more and more frustrated with the AI tools showing up in places like Windows or in Photoshop. For the first time ever I am meeting career artists and designers who are actively looking to add non-AI alternatives to their usual toolchains because they feel betrayed by the addition of generative AI.

Apple is asking to lose the trust of a major market segment by charging forward with this stuff. You would think that the backlash to their "Crush!" commercial would have been an eye-opening moment for them about what Artists actually expect from them...

I would be careful about bias here. The loudest people are often the most unhappy. I have several graphic design friends who have fully embraced integrating AI into their workflows.

- Today the summary it gave to an iMessage was "Going to sleep, talk to you tomorrow." The girl and I scheduled a video chat date and she said nothing of the sort rather, "Getting ready for tomorrow (along with some other stuff), talk to you soon."

- Siri is still stupid especially compared to ChatGPT on the same iPhone. I use ChatGPT.. speak to it to count my calories throughout the day at the various places i eat at (Chipolte, Cava, Panera, etc) which it knows calories for everything, calculates and keeps track so i add later add my dinner calorie count .. it even knows how many calories i had on Saturday (still recalls it and speaks it upon me asking). Siri via Apple Intelligence is still the old stupid Siri one pony trick which you still can only speak to it once vs. ChatGPT have a conversation with.

What was this Apple Intelligence supposed to do and how was it supposed to be better? I want a ChatGPT phone and by Microsoft sure their Windows Phone was nice!

I agree with the other poster; maybe look at refurb and a 2nd gen pencil.

Or just don’t get one. But it sounds like this is on the short list to buy for you two.

> Or just don’t get one.

This is actually what I am going to do: wait until there is a better base iPad version. Unless I can get an older iPad Pro for a cheap price, but it is unlikely here in EU.

I think if I was in the market for a drawing device on a budget I'd go with an iPad Air that supports the Apple Pencil 2nd generation. Something like the iPad Air 5th or 4th would do well.

iPhone 13 mini was the last flagship smartphone with such dimensions.

Make iPhone Mini -> Mini only accounts for 10% of sales -> Cancel iPhone Mini -> Notice that 10% of iPhone customers haven't updated for 3 or 4 cycles -> Make iPhone Mini -> Suffer crippling corporate amnesia -> <...>

I'm expecting the brain worms to reach step 4 of the corporate consciousness cycle around the next generation or so.

SE1: 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6

Mini 13: 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65

Counting the original SE as a mini is perfectly reasonable.

It's also quite clearly what the grandparent comment was referring to.

The rule for the SE is that it always has the design of second most recent hardware design, regardless of size.

If Apple re-introduces a mini, that will be the first such 'cycle.'

More discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41848298

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BN_Q51d_wUFMs7ajdwI07ESmnmS...

Teachers get $55k-$72k depending on their qualifications. Not great, but not poverty levels either. If they want an iPad, they can probably get one.

Although I wouldn't mind if they got rid of one or two iPhone variants, or at least gave them more meaningful names. I have no idea what the difference between Plus, Pro and Max is. I only know that Pro doesn't mean pro, and that doesn't make it any easier.

Edit: also Steve Jobs was still alive when you could choose between four different iPod variants.

A $200 Chromebook can do 10x. Guess what, that's exactly why schools buy Chromebooks.

math education is not likely going to be "revolutionized" with technology or that would have already happened

Even giving students full access to Mathematica (which I think is worthwhile BTW) won't revolutionize it.

It sure looks like it would though.

Noteful and a competent calculator with CAS functionality on the other hand might be a different outcome.

Either way, and on a more fundamental note: I’m a little dubious that “completing equations” is a net benefit for math education. It really seems like a small nice-to-have-available affordance tacked on to the real game changer: a computer that can adaptively challenge a student and competently answer clarifying questions without making it too easy. Y’know, just AGI stuff lol

As we’ve all seen from ChatGPT’s impact on English courses already, this all will require a fundamental rethink of how we teach children and adolescents. Homework is a bandaid over capitalist failings, and it’s beginning to peel…

As for education, you don't really need a calculator. We don't really use them that much. Pen, paper, ears.

As for computers, programmed randomised questions with deterministic answers and documented steps to solve the problems are the right way. LLMs can't do that even if they look like they can. some universities actually have tools which generate those. Those are truly enlightening as you can see the reasoning properly.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/16/24194423/math-notes-ipad-...

Apple has always been about premium price and quality but I agree that it's not for everyone and their needs.

If the products are actually commodity, just buy something else.

sour grapes, plural noun, disparagement of something that has proven unattainable

> his criticisms are just sour grapes

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sour%20grapes

Maybe their hardware is commodity (arguable), but the product + integrations are not.

So I guess I don’t see them as commodities which implies fungibility.

Can I recommend you a 40€ phone? They've been making models that can do calls for a while now and they needn't cost as much as an Apple-branded device to do just that

> they would drop calls and freeze on the dial pad during long calls

Never heard that happen to anyone with any phone model. If you've ruled out some software-specific issue like a call recorder you've installed or so, that sounds borderline implausible. Then again, given the number of issues I experience with software (of any kind)...

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/some-pixel-users-cant-dial-91...

https://www.slashgear.com/842545/why-antennagate-was-a-compl...

https://www.online-tech-tips.com/android-phone-wont-make-cal...

The keyboard is the most important part really (although I did want a good screen too). I'm on my second keyboard, they are only about $30 each, which is better than iPad prices. The first one wasn't so convenient to unfold quickly, the new one is working really well.