The worst things come to Apple fans who wait

There’s a lot to be said for the pleasures of anticipation, but at a certain point the thing you’re waiting for simply cannot live up to expectations. It gets built up too much, and can only disappoint. Which brings me to the 7th-gen iPad mini.

The latest mini was a long time coming: the 6th-gen model was unveiled three years, one month, and one day previously. Which makes it all the stranger that the new tablet was announced via the discreet medium of an emailed press release rather than with the fanfare of a media event broadcast to millions around the world. Why so shy, Apple? Because it wasn’t very interesting.

The main difference between the new iPad mini and the one released in 2021 is its inclusion of an A17 Pro processor instead of an A15. That’s a solid upgrade in power, and more importantly (as far as Apple’s concerned, at any rate) means the new device is capable of running Apple Intelligence. But it won’t significantly alter your day-to-day experience, because the A15 is still a serviceable chip and the iPad mini is overwhelmingly used for media consumption, emailing, web surfing, and light gaming. Apple Intelligence needs the A17, but you probably don’t.

And the rest of the changes are small tweaks. The physical design is the same, including that sad portrait-orientation FaceTime camera, and while the colors have changed a little, they have done so for the worse: pink is gone, and purple is less vibrant. Elsewhere, the USB-C port supports faster data transfers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have been updated to newer standards, it supports the Apple Pencil Pro and starts at 128GB of storage instead of 64GB. And photos may be fractionally better in difficult lighting because Smart HDR 3 has been bumped to Smart HDR 4.

Does that set of tweaks and iterative upgrades adequately represent three years of technological progress? No. Is it enough of an upgrade that owners of the 6th-gen mini should get the new model? No. Is this a disappointment? Yes. Should you buy a cheaper iPad mini 6 before stock runs out? Also yes.

The worst part, however, is not the fact that so little has changed. The worst part is that now this model has been officially announced, we know nothing more will change for another year at minimum. And we’ll probably be waiting another three years for the iPad mini to finally get a landscape camera and new design.

This isn’t the first long-awaited disappointment we’ve had from Apple in recent years. In fact, it’s not even the first this season: the “new” AirPods Max announced just a month ago failed to address any of the failings with the original headphones or even add any of the audio developments that have appeared since they launched way back in 2020. Before that, the 2023 Mac Pro arrived a whopping four years on from its predecessor, but kept the same design, didn’t let you upgrade RAM or the GPU after purchase, and generally offered zero reasons why it needed to exist alongside the far more appealing Mac Studio.

There’s something about long gaps between product generations that fills me with trepidation. When I think of my favorite Apple updates—the iPod nano, the iPhones 4 and X, the Apple Watch Series 2—they all came hard on the heels of their predecessors, because those lines were alive and healthy. In each case, Apple had a good product with lots of interest and potential, knew how it wanted to improve that product, and got on with the job. If you wait three or four years for an update, that generally means it’s either already perfect (unlikely) or the manufacturer isn’t sure whether it’s worth keeping the product alive at all. Either way, the sequel is unlikely to set the world on fire.

In the end, those who were waiting on an update to buy a new iPad mini will probably wish Apple didn’t bother. No update is better than a half-baked apology for an update, because at least the former allows you to hope for better things to come. And there’s a lot to be said for the pleasures of anticipation.