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The Frustrating iPad Mini

The sixth generation Apple iPad Mini is such an amazing device, I don’t understand why Apple insists on crippling it. Then again, why be surprised? Apple does this to their entire iPad line.

Anyone who knows me, or even peruses some of my previous posts on tablets, knows that I have a contentious relationship with Apple and, especially, iPads. Hardware-wise, they are above reproach. There are so many little details to their design that I beg others to copy.

For example, I’m a huge fan of the folio cover. At first glance, though, it has a fatal flaw that when opened, and held open by magnets, it blocks the camera. Only you can fold down that top most flap and it will be held open, again by little magnets. The entire affair is solid, easy to hold, and just plain works.

No other tablet I’ve seen comes close to how well Apple does the hardware and all their accessories. For the larger iPads, the Magic Keyboard is a thing of pure joy. The tactile feel is magnificent, the way it holds the tablet at a near-perfect angle is unmatched. Its greatest failing is that it’s heavy, easily doubling the weight of the iPad, but if you type a lot or for a living, this is a no-brainer purchase.

It’s when you actually attempt to be productive that the entire ecosystem falls apart. If you are fully committed to the Apple world, this may not be the case. If you are running a mixed system, something that incorporates Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung (e.g., me), then it’s a disaster on the hoof.

On my Windows 10 desktop or Windows 11 laptop, I can run Word and Scrivener. While I could run Scrivener on my iPad Pro, it insists I use Dropbox for cross-platform syncing. That makes it a non-starter since I use OneDrive for cloud services. Latte & Literature have (or had; I'm not sure they're still relevant) legit reasons for why their iOS version of Scrivener requires Dropbox, but the bottom line for me is that it kills the iOS product.

Word on the iPad feels ridiculously crippled. I’m not sure why this is so, but at the end of the day I find myself fighting the software rather than using it. This doesn’t happen, obviously, on the PCs but it also doesn’t happen if I’m using my Samsung tablet. While Word on Android isn’t as full-featured as on the PC, it has all the tools I need to do what I want to do, unlike Word on iOS. It’s little things, yes, but they add up.

As a result, I gave up on productivity on the iPad and traded my iPad Pro for the new iPad Mini. The sixth-generation device takes on the design language of the Pro and Air models and is gorgeous. Having given up on productivity uses, my Mini becomes a content delivery system and portable game machine, and for these uses it’s near brilliant. Do I miss the high refresh rate display? A wee bit, yes. Do I notice the jelly rolling of the display? A wee bit, yes. Do I care? No, not even a wee bit.

What frustrates me is iPadOS. First, this should be a blisteringly fast tablet. Everything about it screams speed. There is no task that I perform that taxes this system in the slightest. Yet, in daily use the OS feels sluggish and often unresponsive. I tap an icon, nothing happens. I tap a back arrow and nothing happens. I tap a command and nothing happens. I do a slower tap, voila. Seriously? On MS and Android machines, the same tap gets an immediate response. Here, not so much.

The animations drag everything down. They look pretty but slow. Again, both MS and Android just snap and I can tweak the speed if I so desire. But Apple thinks it’s evil for a user to have or exercise such control, so nyet, nein, chotto, etc.

Then there’s the display. Not the screen itself or even the basic resolution, but the font size. There is a difference between iOS and iPadOS when it comes to how things are displayed on the home screen. On an iPhone, icons and text are generally a tad bigger because the display is smaller; on an iPad, they’re smaller became the display is bigger. The Mini sits between these two worlds, yet uses the smaller display settings on the larger iPads. The result is you squint to see things. There are also some icons within apps or controls that become ridiculously small, verging on unusable. I tried to delete a shortcut within the Edge browser and it took half a dozen attempts before I was successful, all because the icon was so very, very tiny.

There is no way, that I can readily find, to correct this. You can opt to use a larger font, but it doesn't affect apps at all. Under Windows, you can use scaling to make everything larger or smaller. Under Android, at least Samsung’s various renditions, you can alter font sizes and screen zoom. Under iPad, no go; it is what it is and you shall adapt, silly peasant.

The result is that while the iPad Mini should be a joy to use it’s more often than not a frustrating experience. If Samsung produced a Tab in this size class with the display tech from its S7+, I would own it in a heartbeat. As it is, Android tablets in the 8” range are low-cost throwaway products. And MS doesn’t even try and compete in this arena.

In all other respects, the Mini is a joy to carry around. Since I got a 5G version it can go anywhere and access data anytime. It teeters right on the verge of being a device that could actually replace my phone. Indeed, it could redefine the concept of what a smartphone is, similar to what Samsung is doing with its Fold series.

But Apple won’t let it.

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