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berberous

From a Reddit comment, in addition to the bump from a A8x to A9 chip:

- It's as thick as the iPad Air 1 (and thus thicker than the Air 2/9.7" Pro).

- No laminated display (and no AR coating, True Tone, or wide color).

- Air 2 quality camera.

- The iPad mini 4 is now only available in 128GB, at $399.

- The chamfers look matte, like the iPhone SE.

Also, no Pencil support or smart connector.

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So the 128Gb iPad Mini 4 has a smaller screen and a slower chip than the new 128Gb, but it's only £10 cheaper?

It is hard to see Apple keeping the mini around for much longer. I assume they are simply running down stock and will remove it soon, before end of the year.

That's too bad. I really like my Mini 2.

Why do you say that? It's still mid-life, same as the Pros.

The mini is still the iPad form factor I prefer, so that would be a shame.

I doubt it. The Mini is a great tablet for little kids. It's just the right size for toddlers and they can still hold it even when you put an Otterbox Defender on it.

It works great for me too. I'm 38 and three quarters

You're a cute little munchkin!

They're so adorable at 464 months.

I think people are finding that hand-me-down iPads and cheap trash tablets from Amazon are the best tablets for little kids.

The mini makes a great point-of-sale terminal. It's large enough to display the order and sign on, but small enough that you don't have to clear the counter in order to be able to swivel it around.

If the cheap mini goes away will there be some Android OEM that steps into that market? Or will business owners just suck it up and buy the 128GB version?

Damn. It was the best digital equivalent of book ever created.

I hope not. It's the best form factor. I think all the other iPads are too big.

What's missing (for me) is an iPad Mini Pro. I absolutely prefer the small form factor, but I want the more advanced features.

Also, no Pencil support

Does anyone know is there is a hardware reason that the normal iPad can't use the Pencil or is purely a software thing to make people buy the more expensive iPad Pro.

There is a lot of hardware going into the pencil working as well as it does. For one thing, they increase the update frequency of the display while using the pencil to make the drawing appear more responsive.

It requires hardware built into the display. I'm guessing that it's not very expensive though and the reason they don't incorporate it across the whole line-up is to retain their high margins on the Pro.

I'm not super knowledgeable about this so take this with a grain of salt. Some of this might be wrong.

Good modern touch screens, like the iPhone/iPad/Macbook trackpad are capacitive touch screens. An array of sensors emit a changing electric field which is affected by the dielectric constant of nearby materials, and fingers have a different dielectric constant from air. Capacitive sensors cannot detect pressure (although you can fake it a little).

Good modern digital pens, like the Wacom or Pencil, use radio waves. An array of antennas emits radio waves which are picked up by an antenna in the stylus. A microcontroller in the stylus computes the position and angle of the stylus, reads the pressure from another sensor in the stylus tip, and transmits the data back to the tablet over radio.

So you can see that they really are completely different technologies.

You can make a capacitive stylus, and those exist, you can even buy them at the store. However I've never seen a capacitive stylus that can detect pressure or angle at all, and capacitive sensors can't tell the difference between a stylus and your hand, so you can forget about resting your hand on the screen when you draw. The main reason I'd use a capacitive stylus is because I want to use an iPhone or iPad while I'm wearing gloves.

The Pro screen is a little different too. The iPad Pro doubles the motion detection to 240hz when there is any kind of touching going on, which reduces the latency when drawing. My understanding is that this significantly adds to the cost of the hardware, and is why we don't have Pencil support across the entire line.

I thought that the Pencil does not use a radio a la the Wacom, and is purely Bluetooth, but I can't find any source to back that up so I could be mistaken.

Wacom technology powers the pen through induction, other vendors don't do this. The Apple Pencil and whatever Microsoft calls the pen that the Surface Pro uses require a battery.

I had a Surface Pro for a couple months last year and I don't recall it really having a Name. It was just "the stylus" or "the pen" or "this goddamn NTrig piece of shit that doesn't talk to Illustrator properly".

I also have a Surface Pro and never had any trouble with the pen. I "upgraded" to a Cintiq Pro, and have to say that it's a downgrade in many ways. The screen resolution is worse, the parallax is worse. The pen is better, but honestly neither of them feel that great.

There are software issues with Illustrator losing the first half second of stylus strokes on the SP4. Very frustrating if that's the program you do most of your work in.

Bluetooth is a radio protocol, I was being being deliberately vague when I said "radio".

Fair enough. I was thinking in terms of those proprietary wireless mouse dongles.

How can they justify such a huge regression in the screen?!

The loss of lamination is a regression, but the other features were only present on the Pro model.

They probably got rid of lamination to reduce cost, but I wonder if the loss of lamination will improve repairability.

Sure it will. I once successfully replaced the shattered touchscreen on iPad 2 after just watching 1 YouTube video instruction, and it was pretty cheap since I only had to replace the touchscreen, keeping the same display. With laminated displays, you have to replace the whole package, or employ sophisticated techniques to re-laminate new glass on top of display. It's possible, but requires skills, more specialized tools, and exact amount of special optically clear glue.

They dropped the price by $70

> Also, no Pencil support or smart connector.

the website shows pencil support:

http://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/

Edit: My apologies, I thought we were discussing the 9.7 Pro.

Not any more as far as I can see.

Unless we are seeing different pages, the website seems to show that the iPad does not support the Pencil, whereas the iPad Pros do.

Are you looking at the 9.7" iPad (which we're talking about here), or the 9.7" iPad Pro?

No, it doesn't. The only models with a check mark in that row are the two Pro models.

Perhaps they've just updated the page?

When you compare the new iPad and the Pro 9.7 on the Apple site it says Pencil is supported on both (but Smart Connector is only on the Pro).

Looking at the site now and it says pencil is only compatible with the Pro models

Umm ... no, it's not supported. The first two columns show the two Pro models and the third column is the new 9.7 model.

If you scroll down to "Compatible with Apple Pencil" you'll see that only the first two columns have the checkmark.

20% larger battery.

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