Riccardo Mori

The price of upgrading a Mac

June 14, 2017

I will soon share my observations about the WWDC 2017, but more pressing matters had me looking into various options for a Mac upgrade. (My good old 2009 MacBook Pro lately has been giving me troubling signs that it may not be long for this world.)

During the WWDC 2017 keynote, Apple has announced widespread updates for the Mac line: the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac product families all received better processors and hardware configurations — even the MacBook Air — and also a gentle retouch of certain prices, so that now there is a more affordable ‘entry-level’ 13-inch MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar) at $1,299, and a really interesting 21.5‑inch iMac with retina 4K display model at the same price.

Given the retina display, the latest-generation 3 GHz quad-core Intel i5 CPU, the discrete Radeon Pro 555 GPU with 2 GB of video memory, and the generous port configuration (two Thunderbolt 3 ports, four USB 3 ports, an SDXC card slot, headphone jack and Gigabit Ethernet), this 21.5‑inch 4K iMac has truly attracted my interest, and is the most probable candidate for my next upgrade. The problem is that it’s less affordable than it seems.

First off, let’s take a look at the price in Euro (I live in Spain) and with added taxes, and the base configuration of this 21.5‑inch 4K iMac costs €1,499. To be fair, the $1,299 starting price in the US is before taxes. I simulated a purchase as if I were a New York resident, and the final estimate on the Apple Store page was about $1,400. Still, $1,400 are not €1,500. After a true currency conversion with today’s rates, $1,400 are €1,249. Now, that would be fair.

Then, let’s take a closer look at that base configuration: it has 8 GB of RAM and a 5400rpm 1 TB hard drive. Yes, a hard drive. If you’ve ever upgraded your Mac by switching from a hard drive to a solid-state drive, you know just what kind of a bottleneck a hard drive is with regard to the general responsiveness and speed of the Mac. So, let’s go to the customisation options for this iMac: a 1 TB Fusion Drive costs €120 more; a 256 GB SSD is €240 more; a 512 GB SSD is €480 more. If I settle for a 256 GB SSD, the price of the iMac becomes €1,739 already.

Then there’s the RAM. Now, I’m not saying 8 GB are bad, but given that a Mac’s upgrade cycle is generally slow, with machines lasting more than a few years (for regular customers without specific ‘pro’ needs), 8 GB may not be enough down the road. A wiser, more forward-looking decision is to opt for 16 GB of RAM. And that is €240 more — the ‘affordable’ 21.5‑inch 4K iMac has now reached a price of €1,979, simply for choosing a couple of extras that, in mid-2017, should really be standard fare. If not the RAM, at least the SSD.

But hey, if one’s budget is limited, a solution could be to just purchase the iMac as is, and update the RAM and drive later. The good news comes from the iFixit folks who, when performing their 21.5‑inch 4K iMac teardown, have discovered that the RAM is user-replaceable and not soldered on the motherboard. (The drive is replaceable too, but that was more obvious). The bad news is that, to replace the drive and add more RAM, you basically have to dismantle the whole iMac, and I for one am not thrilled by having to cut out and separate the display to get to the machine’s innards.

When the time comes for me to get a new Mac — and given my MacBook Pro’s current conditions, it’ll have to be soon — I will very likely choose this entry-level Retina 4K iMac because overall it’s good value for its money compared to other solutions. After doing some easy calculations, however, it seems I’ll be able to afford only one configuration upgrade, and I hate to be put in a position where I have to decide to either choose more RAM or a better internal drive. I have been using Apple computers since 1989 and never questioned the premium one usually pays when choosing Apple, but these iMac base configurations and related built-to-order options feel like a bit of nickel-and-diming on Apple’s part.

Aside from my personal needs and upgrade scenarios, if we look at other solutions in the current Mac product lines, we encounter details such as these:

Even the top-of-the-line 27-inch Retina 5K iMac is offered with only 8 GB of RAM. I mean, it’s the current, most professional configuration for a desktop Mac; it wouldn’t hurt having 16 GB already in its base configuration, and Apple could easily charge $200 more for it. It’d look better and I don’t think anyone would complain. Well, at least the RAM in the 27-inch iMac is easily upgradable by the user.
The entry-level 12-inch Retina MacBook and the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar) both cost $1,299. The latter has a bigger and brighter screen with more resolution, a better processor, one more USB‑C port, a better GPU, and even a better camera. Compared to the 12-inch MacBook, the only ‘drawbacks’ are that it’s slightly larger, that it weighs 450 grams more, and that it has a 128 GB SSD instead of a 256 GB SSD. I’m sure there are people whose priority is having the lightest, most compact portable Mac, and who, faced with this comparison, would undoubtedly choose the 12-inch MacBook. But in my view, offering these two models for the same price immediately puts the smaller MacBook at a disadvantage. The moment weight and dimensions cease to be crucial, anyone can see how the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the better deal here.
Pay attention when you’re customising the configuration of the Mac you intend to buy. As Adam Engst at TidBITS warns, you could end up with a worse configuration for the same price depending on how you start, or you might pay more for the same configuration. Read the article for more detailed information and advice.

Final considerations

While I understand that certain design constraints may impact the upgradability of a machine, I’m still rather baffled at the relative rigidity of Apple’s offerings. Having to decide how much RAM, what kind of storage solution, and how much storage at the time of purchase puts customers in a difficult position, as they have to make a decision right away that will very often affect their Mac for its entire lifecycle. No Mac is a throwaway machine, and while there are exceptions, a lot of people keep their Macs for many years. Looking at the stingy base configurations for many Macs, Apple pushes people towards two main behaviours:

Be content with the base configuration of a Mac model, and as soon as it’s not enough for your needs (or to handle whatever new technology will be thrown at you down the road), just get another Mac.
Customise at once the Mac model you want, and end up with a fairly future-proof machine that will certainly last you more years, but spending much more money on it in the process.

From Apple’s standpoint, this is a great strategy, of course. It makes sense. I’m a terribly budget-conscious customer, alas, but even if I weren’t, the thing that irritates me the most is how certain components of many Mac base configurations look purposefully unappealing to induce people to upgrade them right away, thus spending more money. I mean, a spinning 5400rpm hard drive in a retina iMac, in 2017? I had a 5400rpm hard drive when I purchased my 12-inch PowerBook G4 more than 13 years ago. Eight gigabytes of RAM in the high-end 27-inch Retina 5K iMac, aimed at customers whose needs very likely demand a bare minimum of 16 GB of RAM? Laptops with a non-upgradable 128 GB SSD? All this with base model configurations that aren’t exactly cheap from the start. It doesn’t strike me as treating your customers respectfully.

Every time I bring up this topic, some people feel the need to point out that my complaints are simply dictated by my limited budget, but my beef is less money-related than it seems. It has to do with something I already pointed out above — and that is essentially the way Apple controls and conditions most upgrade paths when it comes to purchasing a new Mac. You either stick with underwhelming base configurations that will remain unchanged for as long as you have that Mac, or you upgrade components at once, up-front, at the time of purchase, and put up with the considerable premium Apple charges you for that^[1]. And in those cases (like the 21.5‑inch 4K Retina iMac I’m interested in) where you technically could upgrade RAM and hard drive yourself at a later date, having to dismantle the machine completely to achieve that (with the far-from-remote possibility that you end up damaging something in the process) makes the option unappealing and a very ‘last resort’ one at that.

1. While they might not classify as ‘considerable premiums’, don’t get me started on the customisation options for included accessories like keyboards, mice, and trackpads. If I want a Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad instead of the more compact one, Apple charges €30 more. When you’re buying a machine that already costs €1,500 — and may cost you as much as €6,199 for a fully upgraded high-end 27-inch iMac — those additional 30 euros look downright offensive. ↩︎

Let’s have both Reach Navigation and the navbar

June 2, 2017

by Riccardo Mori

Software

I read with interest Brad Ellis’s article on Medium, All Thumbs, Why Reach Navigation Should Replace the Navbar in iOS Design, and I wanted to add a few observations on the matter.

He writes:

As devices change, our visual language changes with them. It’s time to move away from the navbar in favor of navigation within thumb-reach. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call that Reach Navigation.

This introduction is also the core of Ellis’s thesis. And I both agree and disagree. I agree that, instead of stretching a thumb or readjusting the device in one’s hand to tap out-of-reach UI elements, a navigation within thumb reach would be ideal. It would be better from a usability standpoint. At the same time, I think that doing away with the navbar is a mistake, again from a usability standpoint.

The navbar is important for all the reasons Ellis himself lists, and I’d emphasise its importance in navigating apps with lots of hierarchically-arranged screens, such as iOS’s Settings app. The navbar helps users find where they are in a series of nested screens; it’s like the Path Bar in Mac OS’s Finder.

Of the solutions Ellis proposes, I find the best to be suggesting developers to design their apps in a way that renders the navbar unnecessary. But here I want to stress another point: discoverability. Don’t make apps that are obscure to navigate. I like the navbar as a core UI element because it’s generally transparent in telling you where you are, and also because, as a personal preference, I’d rather tap on self-explanatory labels than start to ‘guess-swipe’ on different areas of the screen to see what happens. Will I uncover a hidden drawer/sheet/panel the UI design never hinted at, for example?

I’m not a fan of swiping as a navigational gesture, or better, as the only navigational gesture. My main peeve with swiping is that with some apps it’s very easy to inadvertently tap on a UI element on the current screen that triggers some other action, like dropping a pin on a map, highlighting a text field (which in turn triggers the virtual keyboard), or opening another screen entirely. This is something I’ve noticed happening (to me, at least) the bigger the iOS device screen gets — i.e. on the Plus-sized iPhones and on iPads. Tapping on the navbar, in this regard, feels safer.

The navbar is also a better solution with regard to accessibility. Tapping may require more precision than swiping, but I think it also requires less effort.

And here’s a good piece of advice from Ellis:

Prioritize placing buttons at the bottom of the screen.

[…]

Move the most-used items to the bottom.

Which inspired my humble proposal: Just move the navbar to the bottom of the screen.

Now, I haven’t tested my idea with all the apps, but as far as iOS’s built-in apps which feature a navbar, my proposal seems to work. Here are two examples in the Settings app. On the left, the screen as it is now in iOS 10.3.2. On the right, a quick mockup of my bottom navbar proposal:

navbar comparison 1

navbar comparison 2

In this second example, I find that moving the navbar to the bottom (and maintaining the screen’s Title at the top) also makes for a less cluttered and more legible top area, especially on the 4‑inch display of the iPhone 5/5c/5s/SE. Long labels like Display & Brightness here can finally be centred on the screen, and feel less condensed.

Another example, with iOS’s Photos app:

navbar comparison 3

I chose this app because here we see that the navbar would be placed above a bottom-row of buttons. In this instance, a possible criticism may be that placing the navbar there could create a bit of interference with the Photos, Shared, and Albums buttons. But I think that with the navbar within easy reach, accidentally hitting an element of the bottom row instead of one of the labels in the navbar is also less likely, unless you have really big fingers.

These are quick and rough mockups, I’ll admit. The navbar at the bottom could be made visually more prominent, for example. I also realise it might take a while before getting accustomed to the new placement, but the added convenience of having more reachable navigational tappable labels could facilitate the process. Again, this is just an idea I haven’t fully explored in all possible instances system-wide, but I think it could be a ‘best of both worlds’ solution: make navigation easier with more reachable controls, without losing the navbar and creating a potentially opaque navigation interface.

The disappearing computer and what it disappears

May 30, 2017

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Walt Mossberg’s last column, The Disappearing Computer, is well worth reading and has certainly given me much to mull over these past few days.

I think his analysis and predictions regarding the direction technology is going to take in the short-to-medium term are rather spot-on. Much of what’s going to happen feels inevitable. That doesn’t mean I have to like it or be okay with it. And for the most part I don’t and am not.

All of the major tech players, companies from other industries, and startups whose names we don’t know yet are working away on some or all of the new major building blocks of the future. They are: artificial intelligence / machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics and drones, smart homes, self-driving cars, and digital health / wearables.

The first thing that struck me upon reading this list was how little I’m interested in those things (save, perhaps, for wearable health monitors). Apart from personal preferences and interest, though, I can see how some of those fields can provide some degree of usefulness to people. What worries me, generally speaking, is the price we’ll have to pay in the process of bringing such technologies into the mainstream. Another thing that worries me is the state of our planet, and none of those technologies strikes me as an Earth-saving technology. There are days in which I feel particularly bitter, and the world looks like the Titanic, and technology like the orchestra that keeps playing sweet music in our ears while we all sink.

Whenever I voice my concerns about where technology is driving us, I am mistaken for a Luddite, or for a technophobe. I’m not. I simply refuse to drink the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are great concepts that can have a lot of useful implementations, but to generate meaningful output, to produce a response that mimics intelligence, a machine needs a huge amount of data. A machine isn’t intelligent, it’s just erudite. A lot of data is collected without enough transparency. A lot of data about us is collected without our explicit consent. A certain amount of personal data is tacitly given away by ourselves in exchange for some flavour of convenience. My biggest concern is that a lot of data is being collected by a few entities, a few ‘tech giants’, which are private corporations with little to no external oversight. And despite their public narratives, I seriously doubt their goal is to advance humanity and make our lives better in a disinterested fashion.

I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought.

Your whole home, office and car will be packed with these waiting computers and sensors. But they won’t be in your way, or perhaps even distinguishable as tech devices.

This is ambient computing, the transformation of the environment all around us with intelligence and capabilities that don’t seem to be there at all.

On the surface, this is all great and exciting. On the other hand, I don’t want technology to be too much out of the way. Or, in other words, while I think it’s cool that tech becomes more ‘invisible’, I don’t want it to also become more opaque. I don’t want devices I can’t configure. I don’t want impenetrable black boxes in my daily life, no matter how much convenience they promise in return.

Google has changed its entire corporate mission to be “AI first” and, with Google Home and Google Assistant, to perform tasks via voice commands and eventually hold real, unstructured conversations.

Not long ago, I humorously remarked on Twitter: “Remember, it’s Google’s Assistant. Not yours.” Well, I wasn’t really joking. I’m utterly astonished at the amount of people who don’t mind giving Google a great deal of personal information, only for the convenience of having a device they can ask in natural language, e.g. How long is it going to take me to get to my office if I leave by car in 15 minutes? and receive a meaningful response. To receive precise trivia for answers, people are willing to put devices in their homes which basically monitor them 24/7 and send data to a big, powerful private corporation.

The problem is that a lot of non-tech-savvy people don’t care and don’t react until they see or feel the damage. In conversations, I often hear the implicit equivalent of this position: “Yeah, I’ve been giving Google/Facebook/etc. all kind of personal information over the years, but none of them harmed me in return; what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that someone else now owns and controls personal information about you, and you don’t know exactly how much data they have, and how they’re using it. Just because they’re not harming you directly or in ways that immediately, visibly affect you, it doesn’t make the whole process excusable. A company may very well collect a huge amount of personal information and just sit on it for years until they figure what to do with it; one day the company gets hacked, all the data is exposed, your accounts and information are compromised, and oh, at this point people are finally angry and upset, and blame the hackers — when the hackers are just an effect, and not the cause.

I urge you to read Maciej Cegłowski’s transcript of Notes from an Emergency, a talk he recently gave at the re:publica conference in Berlin. It’s difficult to extract quotes from it, exactly because it is entirely quotable. If you want to understand my general position on Silicon Valley, just read how he talks about it. This passage in particular has stuck with me ever since I read it, because it perfectly expresses something I think as well, but with a clarity and briefness I couldn’t find:

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

Back to Mossberg:

Some of you who’ve gotten this far are already recoiling at the idea of ambient computing. You’re focused on the prospects for invasion of privacy, for monetizing even more of your life, for government snooping and for even worse hacking than exists today. If the FBI can threaten a huge company like Apple over an iPhone passcode, what are your odds of protecting your future tech-dependent environment from government intrusion? If British hospitals have to shut down due to a ransomware attack, can online crooks lock you out of your house, office or car?

Good questions.

My best answer is that, if we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined, we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist. Especially in the U.S., it’s time to stop dancing around the privacy and security issues and pass real, binding laws.

From what I’ve seen so far, legal systems everywhere haven’t been able to keep up with the pace technology is moving. It’s extremely unlikely that technology’s pace is going to slow down, and while I hope laws and regulations will be passed and enforced more swiftly, I’m not sure governments will be completely impartial about it, as knowing more about people seems to be a shared agenda between governments and tech giants.

I still hope people themselves can fight back to regain control of their data, but this era of technological progress is also characterised by so much regress in other human behaviours: intolerance, racism, xenophobia, a rise in superstition and distrust of science, the tendency of believing whatever it’s on the Internet without displaying a sliver of critical thought…

And in our tech lives, I witness more and more frequently just how blinded by convenience we’re becoming. Never before have I seen so much aversion towards friction in our daily lives. And convenience is the siren song tech giants are constantly singing in our ears: “Put everything in the cloud, give us your data, your documents, your photos, it all gets out of the way, it’s all synced conveniently to all your connected devices; it’s all so much easier, and so inexpensive!” I agree that certain friction is unnecessary, but there’s also a kind of friction that prevents our brains from working on auto-pilot all the time, that contributes to keeping our minds nimble, that keeps laziness and apathy at bay. Judging from the increasing number of people I see completely engrossed in their smartphones every time I’m out and about, the siren song of convenience is getting more and more intoxicating. Cegłowski is right, The danger facing us is not Orwell, but Huxley. The combo of data collection and machine learning is too good at catering to human nature, seducing us and appealing to our worst instincts. We have to put controls on it. The algorithms are amoral; to make them behave morally will require active intervention.

Perhaps my cynicism and lack of starry-eyed Silicon Valley visions of progress stem from the current bleak picture painted by what’s happening in the world on a daily basis. What is technological evolution without a corresponding human evolution? The first thing that comes to mind is something Lenny tells David Haller in the pilot of the TV series Legion: “Don’t give a newbie a bazooka and be surprised when [they] blow shit up.”

Trust the lion: the Brave browser

May 22, 2017

by Riccardo Mori

Software

It’s been a while since I talked about browsers. Those who have known me for a long time will remember how I’ve always liked to try new browsers and never limited myself to using just one. Given how I usually keep a fair amount of browser tabs open all the time — to access frequently-used resources, and as a buffer for stuff I plan to read later — it’s just unfeasible to use just one browser. For the past several years my multiple browser setup has involved a main browser (Safari, unquestionably), and usually two, sometimes even three, secondary ones.

My preferences for these secondary browsers have changed with time. When I used PowerPC Macs as main machines, Camino and Stainless would be my choices other than Safari. When I decided to remove Flash from my system, the secondary browser would become Chrome because it incorporates a Flash plug-in, and I would resort to Chrome to access those websites requiring Flash to work. Then in recent years, when 99% of the sites I visit either don’t use Flash anymore, or serve HTML5 content, I’ve basically stopped using Chrome. Meanwhile, Firefox and Opera have been getting better and better: faster, leaner, less resource-hungry, less memory-leaky, less bloated, generally way more pleasant to use than in the past. And so, for a relatively long period of time, my browser trinity has been Safari, Firefox and Opera. Another browser I tried for a while was Sleipnir, but, while I appreciate the software, its user interface never really clicked for me. I left Opera behind when Vivaldi came out. And just when I started getting accustomed to Vivaldi, I discovered Brave.

In this age of invasive Web advertising and tracking, I find Brave to be a great resource to browse faster, safer, and better. I know it sounds like a slogan, but it’s true. Ads and trackers get automatically blocked when you browse with Brave, and as you imagine this has a very positive impact on performance (and energy consumption if you’re using a laptop). But Brave also wants to help publishers and content providers with Brave Payments, a micropayment system where

Readers may choose a monthly contribution amount which is divided among the publisher sites they visit most. […] Once a user enables Brave Payments, the Brave browser automatically and anonymously keeps track of the publisher sites each user visits. The more times that a user visits a site, the larger the proportion of the user’s monthly contribution is “ear-marked” for that publisher. These funds grow as new micropayments are added.

Check out the above-linked Brave Payments page for more information on how to become an official partner of Brave. I think it’s a great idea, and I’m considering becoming one myself. In my case the problem is that I don’t update my blog really frequently; it’s what one would call a ‘slow feed’, so it’s unlikely that it would make the top list of a visitor’s ‘most frequented’ sites… Oh well, never say never, right?

Brave is open source, and available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. (See the Downloads page).

Really, just take a tour of the Brave website for all the information about what Brave does and why it’s faster and safer to use it for browsing. Everything you need to know is explained clearly and to the point. My experience so far on the Mac has been great. The interface and application chrome are minimal and let you concentrate on the content. Very occasionally I’ve noticed some intermittent spikes in CPU usage, but most of the times it was the website’s fault. Lots of ad-ridden tech sites load noticeably faster. To achieve a similar performance on Safari, I had to install specific blockers like AdBlock, Ghostery, and more importantly Better by Ind.ie, which I truly recommend.

Brave on iOS

I saved what I consider the best bit for last, though. If you, like me, still own and use older iOS devices with 32-bit CPU architecture, you’ll know that unfortunately they don’t support the Safari content blocking feature Apple introduced in iOS 9. As I wrote previously:

I’ve always found this limitation quite irritating because — as I often stated — this is the kind of feature that would be especially helpful on older devices. A lot of today’s websites are so littered with ads and all kinds of unrelated, superfluous content that loading them becomes unnecessarily cumbersome and resource- and battery-draining. On older devices the issue is exacerbated: my iPad 3, which is still a good performer overall, becomes very sluggish on certain ad-heavy websites.

Well, rejoice, because the ad- and tracker-blocking features in Brave for iOS do indeed work with older devices — well, relatively older, as its minimum requirement is iOS 9.0. I still haven’t tried it on my wife’s iPad 2, but on my iPad 3 Brave appears to achieve the best browser performance so far. Ads and trackers are effectively blocked, and with an iOS device of that vintage, you really notice the difference in loading speeds and responsiveness. On my iPhone 5 it’s even better.

In the first empty tab when you launch Brave, and whenever you open a new tab, the browser shows a few default shortcuts for sites people frequently visit; as you keep using Brave, the shortcuts of the sites you visit more often will start appearing next to those. Above the shortcuts, Brave displays a few statistics:

Brave iOS

This is Brave five minutes after using it for the first time and visiting just three pages of The A.V. Club website: 47 ads blocked, 91 trackers blocked. Macworld’s home page on the Mac loads in 3.43 seconds, while on my iPad 3 it takes a bit longer, about 6 seconds — which is still great, considering that on Safari it takes no less than 18–20 seconds before the site fully loads and can be navigated.

When you visit a site, tapping the Brave logo in the toolbar shows you the Site shield settings, where you can fine-tune what you want to block:

Brave iOS shield

To sum up, Brave appears to be a very promising browser and project; it’s been around for a couple of years now, but I’ve found it to be more mature and reliable since late 2016. For the past seven months I’ve been using only Safari and Brave on my Mac, and it has become my go-to browser on my older iOS devices because, as far as I know, it seems to be the only browser with effective ad-blocking and tracker-blocking capabilities for 32-bit iOS devices. Check it out if you haven’t already, or if you did when it was still in a very beta stage and disappointed you. You may be surprised.

iPad mini and uncertain differentiation

May 17, 2017

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Yesterday I learnt — via this post on Michael Tsai’s blog — that the iPad mini has basically reached the end of the line.

My first reactions are in line with Tsai and Nick Heer’s. Tsai writes:

That’s a shame. Maybe the iPad mini hasn’t been selling well because it’s been neglected. The full-size iPad is too big and heavy for my liking. I’ve actually been hoping for a smaller and lighter iPad mini, more like a Kindle. As a fan of the iPhone SE, the fact that Apple sells a 5.5‑inch phone does nothing to help my tablet needs. I don’t want a big phone, or a second phone. If they had a 5.5–6.5‑inch iPod touch, that could be interesting, though it wouldn’t be able to run true iPad apps.

Heer writes:

I’ll miss the Mini, though. Quite apart from size, the weight difference between the Mini and the 9.7‑inch iPad makes the smaller model so much nicer to hold with one hand. The Mini also has the highest-density display that ships in any iPad which, combined with the weight and size, makes it perfect for reading.

(Emphasis mine in both quotes)

I’ve never been the target audience for a small-size iPad, not because I’m one of those people who prefer to have just one big iPhone for everything; rather, I’m among those who greatly prefer the combination of a small iPhone and a regular 9.7‑inch iPad. I also believe this combination — although being more expensive to maintain — is the one that delivers the best phone and tablet experience. The phone (with the iPhone 5/5s/SE form factor) has a big-enough screen, is easily pocketable, and can still be used comfortably with one hand. Using a tablet instead of an oversized phone has the advantage of apps with optimised UI, apps and games that are way more convenient and enjoyable on a tablet’s bigger screen, and why not, better battery life among other things.

But this doesn’t mean a device like the iPad mini doesn’t make sense. Not everybody likes the ‘one big iPhone fits all’ solution, and not everybody necessarily likes big iPads to use along with their smaller iPhones either. The current iPad mini 4 is a powerful device in a small package, and I think it’s perfect for people who, like Tsai and Heer, like a lightweight tablet that can be easily held one-handed, and like using it especially for reading, as if it were a kind of Kindle on steroids. Perhaps if Apple had taken the opportunity to better highlight what a great combination the iBooks Store and the iPad mini make, that could have driven more iPad mini sales. Perhaps if Apple had introduced the first iPad mini with a retina display already, more people would have found it a more attractive proposition from the start. There was a moment where I did believe the iPad mini could be a serious competitor to Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a pity Apple didn’t share the same belief.

In general, I think the iPad mini is a victim of a process I like to call uncertain differentiation. To speak plainly, I believe that when Apple started introducing different sizes in the iPad product line, they created a bit of a mess, bewildering customers and possibly diluting the success of the iPad. I call it uncertain differentiation because it’s not that introducing iPads in different sizes was a bad idea per se; it wasn’t. The bad idea has been not creating compelling-enough cases for the various iPad formats. The iPad mini: smaller and lighter than a regular iPad and… that’s it. That was the pitch. The 12.9‑inch iPad Pro: bigger screen, more powerful hardware than a regular iPad… Okay, and it also supports the Pencil and can do some ‘pro’ things. That’s basically it. Not differentiated enough (software-wise) to justify the creation of a ‘pro’ line.

Over the years, from what I have observed, customers have responded rather clearly, despite Apple’s involuntary attempts at bewildering them — the original 9.7‑inch is still the preferred size. The iPad mini and the big iPad Pro haven’t been compelling enough, for different reasons. And since customers love the 9.7‑inch size, let’s create a bit of interference by having a 9.7‑inch ‘pro’ and ‘non-pro’ iPads, another example of bland, uncertain differentiation. And since the 5th-generation iPad is proving to be a success, let’s see if we can differentiate a bit more by (according to rumours) planning to introduce “a redesigned iPad Pro to be launched this summer that should offer everything the current 9.7‑inch iPad features, but in a smaller footprint with a larger 10.5‑inch display.”

Perhaps I’m speaking out of cynicism, but to me this whole post-Jobs iPad strategy feels too much like a “let’s throw different ideas and see what sticks” approach. Nick Heer observes:

Geller also mentions that the 9.7‑inch iPad Pro is being replaced this summer with a 10.5‑inch model, a rumour which has been corroborated by multiple websites. However, no report I’ve seen yet mentions the 12.9‑inch Pro, and that doesn’t make any sense to me: the 9.7‑inch Pro was introduced more recently than its larger sibling and has features that the bigger model still doesn’t, like a True Tone display and higher-quality cameras. It would surprise me if Apple updated the 9.7‑inch Pro first, or didn’t make a meaningful upgrade to the 12.9‑inch model at the same time — yet, I haven’t seen a single rumour about the big iPad Pro. Very peculiar.

My thoughts exactly. I happen to love the 12.9‑inch form factor, and if I could afford it, I’d upgrade from my old iPad 3 in a heartbeat. I really hope Apple is planning to revitalise the big iPad Pro through the addition of specific features and differentiating capabilities in iOS 11. I’d hate to see the 12.9‑inch iPad Pro ending up like the mini — a withered branch of the iPad tree — just because Apple wasn’t able to convincingly push it, thus squandering its potential. I know, it’s a trite exercise, but sometimes I wonder how would Jobs have handled the iPad evolution. My guess is that the iPad lineup would be simpler, with less differentiation in nomenclature, and more differentiation in actual features and capabilities.