By Philip Michaels

HomeView doesn’t need to be another app dispenser

This may sound like an odd request coming from a guy whose to-do list includes filing a weekly App Report highlighting interesting macOS and iOS offerings, but I really hope Apple keeps a tight lid on the apps that can appear on its HomeView smart display. I’d even take that wish one step further to implore app makers not to flood the zone with HomeView-based offerings if there ever comes a day that Apple does open up development for its latest device.

This is not me hoping for less work in the future due to laziness, though Lord knows, I am that. Rather, it’s a recognition of the fact that, as showcased by Apple, the HomeView seems to serve a very specific purpose and turning it into a device that can run every app under the sun like the iPhone and iPad before it might lessen its effectiveness.

The HomeView needs to act as a hub when you need it to be and stay out of the way the rest of the time. And loading it up with too many apps might make it more difficult for the HomeView to recede into the background.

From what I’ve seen of HomeView during its October debut, Apple designed this $299 hub as a way to control your smarthome devices while also taking care of a few other tasks, whether that’s listening to music, checking out recipes, staying up to date on your messages or what have you. That’s true whether we’re talking about the table-top model with its adjustable Liquid Retina display or the version of HomeView that you mount on the wall. In either case, the guiding principle of HomeView appears to be simplicity.

What HomeView doesn’t appear to be is a device that demands to be at the center of your life, even if “hub” is part of the description. You’re already carrying around a device that keeps you constantly connected in the form of an iPhone, and when you need a big screen for more intensive work, you can turn to a Mac or even an iPad. In contrast, the HomeView seems like it’s designed for very specific purposes and not much else.

The app situation on the initial model arriving in stores on November 13 reflects that. Apple lists 15 included apps on board the HomeView, and apart from Intercom — a HomeView-specific app that lets you make audio announcements throughout the home to connected speakers — they’re going to be familiar offerings to anyone who’s used an Apple device.

There’s the Home app, of course, for controlling smart devices from a central location, and Apple includes a few other familiar faces for managing your daily life. Apps like Calendar, Reminders and Weather give you an overview of your day. Safari lets you browse the web from your HomeView, with a special mode for displaying recipes if you’ve got the device set up in a kitchen. Music and Podcasts let you stream entertainment while you’re going about your business, and you can connect to TV, Audiobooks and a handful of other options on your iPhone for additional entertainment resources. And there’s FaceTime for video chats — ideal for the HomeView since you don’t have to hold the device and talk like you would on an iPhone or iPad.

Save for a workaround for audio and video apps that support CarPlay, you can’t install apps on your HomeView. There’s also no App Store, suggesting that Apple thinks of this device as a closed shop, at least out of the gate.

Of course, the iPhone took the same approach initially. It’s hard to remember after two decades of “There’s an app for that” marketing, but the phone Steve Jobs showed off back in 2007 had 15 apps, and that was that. It took a year for Apple to open up the iPhone for third-party apps, and developers were quick to make up for lost time.

Could a similar scenario play out with the HomeView? Certainly, it’s possible. If you’re already using your home hub to look up recipes, why not add a calorie-counting or meal-planning app? You can access your daily schedule and your to-dos, so why not add your health data as well, with maybe some exercise apps thrown in for good measure? Oh, and the HomeView supports entertainment apps, you say? Well, nothing’s more entertaining than games, all the games, oh so many games.

That’s the sort of mission creep I think Apple must avoid with the HomeView. Some apps for managing your life make sense, so long as they’re consistent with the idea of a central hub that you’re checking when it’s convenient. But if you keep expanding that functionality to an ever-increasing array of apps, the HomeView becomes just another screen you wind up staring at, no different from an iPhone or iPad or what have you. And perhaps paradoxically, the need for a device like a HomeView dissipates as its functionality expands.

So my plea for the HomeView — to Apple, to app makers, to anyone who will listen really — is to think long and hard about expanding the home hub’s ability to add apps. Take it from someone who ekes out a living reviewing these sorts of things: Sometimes less is more.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Glenn Fleishman

No, Apple isn’t using Live Listen to listen to you

Live Listen is a valuable accessibility feature for people who need assistance hearing things around them. It can stream the sound from the microphone on an iPhone or iPad to Apple-compatible hearing aids, AirPods, or supported models of Beats headphones.¹

This can be extremely useful for someone with hearing loss, or even to understand other people in a busy room, because the benefits of the iPhone’s multiple mics canceling out noise can make a muddled or incomprehensible conversation clear to hear.

Because we live in an age of conspiracy, some bozos have decided that an innocuous, well-documented feature that’s existed since 2020 (with iOS 14.3/iPadOS 14.3) somehow translates to “all the iPhones and iPads with this update, both personal and operational, are by default listening in on all conversations around them, transcribing them, and sending those transcriptions up to Apple for advertising purposes” to quote from misinformation across two posts on Bluesky.²

The impetus appears to be a setting in iOS and iPadOS at Settings: Accessibility: Audio & Video: Live Listen, called Remote Control. It would have first appeared in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, and the current panic alleges it was turned on by default in the 27 updates.

But the Remote Control feature has nothing to do with Apple grabbing your audio. It’s part of a privacy-forward, locked-down feature that extends the utilities of your devices logged into the same Apple Account.

This conspiracy appears to have started on X, the every-bad-theory app, but has spread. Sensible people I know are asking whether this is a risk. Let me break this down.

Live Listen and Remote Control

If you have trouble hearing people in crowded situations, places with echoes, or just in general, your iPhone or iPad can act like an isolating microphone—that’s Live Listen. You can only enable it if you have a supported device nearby and active. Then, you can:

• Go to Settings: Accessibility: Audio & Video: Live Listen and tap Start Live Listen.
• Tap the Live Listen button, which looks like a microphone, in Control Center; or the Hearing Devices button, which looks like an ear, and choose the hearing device, like AirPods.³
• Use other pathways described in Apple’s support note.

Starting in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, enabling Live Listen lets you also turn Live Captions on. So you’re not only hearing a clearer or louder version of audio, you’re also seeing a running transcript of what it’s picking up. You can move through the entire Live Listen session in both audio and captions.

The remote control option for Live Listen, added in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, allows use of an Apple Watch paired with your iPhone or an iPhone or iPad signed in to the same Apple Account to control Live Listen on the iPhone or iPad that’s in use. That linked device can also view Live Captions in real time.

The words remote control and transcript seem to have provided a sliver of an opening in the oyster of Apple privacy for people specializing in outrage and ragebaiting to crack open the bivalve.

The seeming Patient Zero on X wrote:

Go to your iPhone settings – accessibility – audio & visual – LIVE LISTEN.
Turn off LIVE LISTEN.
It even says it keeps TRANSCRIPTS.
This is NUTS.

While he’s going through psychosomatic anaphylactic shock, let’s look at the real story—and the real risk!

Apple risks entire company on secret recording

You might remember Apple had a run-in with secret recording a while back. The company failed to disclose that some small amount of audio captured by Siri was not just sent to the cloud for processing, but listened to by human beings. Apple agreed to settle a class-action suit in 2025 for $95 million covering 2014 to 2024; the final details are still being approved.

You might also recall that two months ago, I wrote about the new watchOS 27 features Live Rewind and Siri Recap that Apple announced were coming later this year to newer Apple Watch models. At the time, I wrote, “Should your Apple Watch always be listening?” In the classic Betteridge’s Law style,⁴ my answer was: “No.”⁵ I argued that Apple should not release either feature in its current privacy-negative forms—both protect the Apple Watch owner’s privacy, but not the privacy of those they record without proper consent and notification.

So I am hardly a “rah rah Apple is never recording us, sis boom bah” cheerleader. I try to cast a gimlet eye across any such claim.

Thus do the claims fall apart.

First, Apple’s market capitalization is nearly $5 trillion as I write this. The idea that the company would risk its reputation, particularly after the earlier Siri misstep, and expose itself to massive lawsuits worldwide, plummeting sales, and the loss of trillions from its stock value for improving ad targeting is laughable.

Its ad business is estimated at under $10 billion a year; the company doesn’t break it out from service revenue, which was $123 billion in fiscal 2026 out of nearly $500 billion overall.

Second, this all feels predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of Live Listen and its Remote Control option, with some degree of “death paneling” something innocuous to win…points? views? X bucks? Whuffie? I don’t know what the goal is.

The Remote Control function is poorly explained in the Settings app, and doesn’t even use that name in Apple’s documentation. More confusing, if you haven’t set up Live Listen, you see just a Remote Control option enabled by default, but there’s no Start Live Listen button.⁶ Which makes it feel more insidious.

Please speak directly into the flowerpot

With very little effort, it’s possible to determine that neither Live Listen nor Remote Control is a threat. Also, logic is available. But emotion overrides logic, and that’s why this column exists.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

iPhone Duo: The apps are coming

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been using the iPhone Duo as my iPhone and iPad for two weeks now, but here we are. I’m slowly working on a review when I’m not writing a zillion other things related to Apple’s very busy product season.

One thing that’s really changed over the last two weeks is the support for the iPhone Duo among my most-used apps. When I first set it up, the good apps were few and far between. But today, I’m actually surprised when I hit an app that hasn’t been updated to support the Duo. Apple’s data bears this out, as this statement (supplied to Six Colors by Apple) from Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations Susan Prescott points out:

It’s been wonderful to see how quickly developers have embraced iPhone Duo, and we’re grateful for their creativity and innovation. Today there are well over 100,000 apps built for iPhone Duo already live on the App Store, and thousands of optimized apps are being added to the store each day. In the last month alone, thousands of developers have joined us for workshops in 19 cities around the world to experience iPhone Duo firsthand and bring updated apps to their users. The enthusiasm has been incredible, and we’re excited to see the pace of updates continue to accelerate as more and more apps optimize for iPhone Duo.

Here are a few of my favorites thus far: Marco Arment’s Apple Pencil-savvy sketch app Fineliner, Aniline’s social-media client Indigo, Balazs Varkonyi’s RSS client ReadKit, Yoav Zoldan’s TV tracking app Skipper, Cross Forward’s revived weather app Check the Weather, and the YouTube TV app for some election-night multitasking.

By Philip Michaels

App Report: Command centers

We like simple tools here at the App Report, but we also admire apps that could settle for handling just one task but find ways to expand that mission that actually make sense. To that end, two of the entries in this week’s round-up start off with the seemingly simple jobs of expanding text and transcribing meetings, respectively, and turn them into productivity hubs that handle much, much more.

But don’t worry, fans of simplicity — we have some other apps on display that take a much more restrained approach to things like widgets, RSS feeds and reminders.

Whether you’ve got a simple app or a more complex one, we want to hear from you. Send a description to apps@sixcolors.com, and we’ll take a look. We can’t respond to every email, but you might just wind up seeing your submission in a future report.

Continue reading “App Report: Command centers”…

By Jason Snell

MacBook Pro with PROLED review: You could even say it glows

The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is, like its name, a bit overloaded with meaning. Its banner feature is its impressive tandem OLED display, a first on the Mac--but most people will instead remember that display because it's also a touchscreen. Advances in Apple silicon are usually a major part of the story of a new MacBook Pro, but not this time around--these new laptops are powered by the same M5 Pro and Max chips introduced on the MacBook Pro earlier this year.

So, yes, the real story here is the screen--but what a big story that screen is! In fact, it's two big stories.

OLED and everything after

Let's start with that OLED display, because it's clear that this new laptop redesign (the first since the M1 era in 2021) was inspired entirely by the desire to move the MacBook Pro off of mini-LED backlit LCD panels and onto OLED at last.

Let's be clear: The "old" MacBook Pro display is spectacularly good. But there's only so much even Apple could do with that technology. OLED is just superior, in so many ways: it's thinner and lighter, uses less power, and every single pixel emits light on its own, so you can have spectacularly bright areas with pitch-black pixels right next door. (The contrast ratio on the PROLED XDR display is ten million to one.)

The display really is impressive. Obviously, its primary target audience will be creative professionals who can take advantage of the wide color gamut (P3+Adobe RGB) and high dynamic range to create work without any fear that they're not seeing exactly what they expect to see. For me, a person who mostly works in typed words and audio, well, it sure was something to pull up 4K HDR movies on the PROLED XDR display.

I was also impressed by just how bright the screen can get. Obviously, bright HDR content will be incredibly bright, up to a peak of 2000 nits. But I was also impressed with its brightness in standard dynamic range. In bright environments (think: direct sunlight), the display is actually capable of cranking up SDR brightness to 2000 nits, because even in direct sunlight, you do need to see your computer's display to get anything done.

Since this is an OLED display, there could potentially be lifespan-limiting issues like burn-in. Apple says the laptop is continuously monitoring each pixel on the display and applying compensation to reduce long-term burn-in and retain as much consistency and precision as possible.

Just as those M1 MacBook Pro models introduced us to the "notch," a camera and sensor cut-out smack in the middle of the menu bar, the PROLED MacBook Pros introduce the Dynamic Island to the Mac for the first time. In other words, the "notch" is now a small circular cut-out from the display. Rather than leaving it as blank space, Apple has taken a page from iOS and turned it into the Mac's own Dynamic Island. (It's still dead center in the menu bar, though, so menu items will need to leap over the island as they did the notch.)

Spotlight and Siri AI are now animated as emerging from the black blob that is the Dynamic Island. Now Playing appears up there, too, and you can click¹ or tap² on the Dynamic Island to expand it and get playback controls. Shared Live Activities from your paired iPhone should also appear up there, rather than in the menu bar itself, as they do on other Macs.

I'm a big fan of subtle, ambient information presentations that inform you about things happening on your devices. That's why the Dynamic Island was such a fun approach to turning a problem (an unsightly camera cut-out) into a useful feature. The notch never really did anything--it was just a dead zone. The Dynamic Island serves a purpose and the MacBook Pro is better for it.

Continue reading “MacBook Pro with PROLED review: You could even say it glows”…

By Jason Snell

Apple’s fiscal 2026 in charts

On Monday, Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, setting an all-time quarterly revenue record and closing its record fiscal year off with a bang. I made some charts to illustrate the thing, as I tend to do.

Now that Apple’s fiscal 2026 has concluded, it’s time for a second set of colorful financial charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.

Let’s dig into the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue over the last 15 years:

The post-pandemic/Apple silicon leap in 2021 is still notable, obviously. After three years of middling growth, 2025 kicked it into gear and then 2026 went wild—an increase of more than $62B in revenue, or 15.1%. It’s Apple’s best growth year since that magical 2021.

It’s also worth noting the boom-and-flat cycles Apple tends to go through, which are frequently driven by changes to iPhone buying. There was a big kick in 2015, another in 2018, a huge one in 2021 (amplified, again, by pandemic buying and Apple silicon), and a bit of one in 2026.

Continue reading “Apple’s fiscal 2026 in charts”…

By Jason Snell

Safari update brings vertical tabs, adaptive dark mode, AI integration

Safari is getting some major feature updates in the 27.3 updates to Apple’s operating systems, which are due in December and are appearing in a developer beta today: vertical tabs, an adaptive dark mode, and additional integration points with Siri AI.

Now your tabs go the other way

In recent years, numerous browsers have experimented with re-orienting the traditional top-of-the-page tab bar into a vertical stack, and now Safari is joining the parade. (It makes sense, when you think about it, because most of our screens are much wider than they are tall, putting vertical space at a premium.¹)

Vertical tabs aren’t a default, but they are now a new option. The tabs sit on the left sidebar as a strip of icons by default, but if you prefer you can resize the tab bar to also show tab titles. On the Mac, Apple has built a hover effect reminiscent of the macOS Dock that displays the name of the tab when you move the pointer over its icon, and if you pause and hover, it’ll display a floating window with a visual page preview.

Just as with the horizontal tab bar, you can pin tabs—in this case, by dragging them up to the top of the bar. And the new vertical tab system works with both Tab Groups and Apple Intelligence-organized topic views.

This feature isn’t just Mac-specific—it’s also available on iPad and on iPhone Duo, in both portrait and landscape. It’s configurable via the View menu on the Mac and the iPad, and in the Settings app on all platforms.

Please turn off the lights

Apple added support for dark mode back in 2018, and web standards have supported the idea of an alternate dark appearance for ages. The problem is, and has always been, that if a website doesn’t explicitly support dark mode, it will blast its lightness into your eyes and make you unhappy. This is so frustrating that numerous extensions have been built to let users force websites into dark mode, my favorite of which has been Noir.

Still, it’s long past time for the Sherlocking of Noir, and here it comes. In 27.3, if Safari comes across a web page that doesn’t offer a dark mode, it has the ability to intelligently build a dark style for that site, not only darkening backgrounds but tuning text contrast, inverting some logos and graphics, recoloring vector artwork, lifting raised surfaces, and rebalancing layered shadows.

It’s an opt-in feature. When you encounter a site that could be darkened, Safari will ask you to try it out and see if you like it. You can opt to tell Safari to apply dark mode to all websites automatically, or approve the changes on a site-by-site basis.

If a site does offer a dark mode—but it’s one that may be a bit too light for comfort—well, Safari is going to respect the original designer’s wishes in that context. Basically, web designers who hate the idea of dark mode and have explicitly guarded against it will not be overridden by Safari. (See, there’s still at least one use case for third-party extensions!)

This is a great feature that’s long overdue as a part of Safari. But Apple needs to not stop here: HTML email in Apple Mail is also a disaster in dark mode. Also, this change doesn’t affect in-app WebViews today, which means your in-app browser sheet will still shout at you in the dark. Once this shakedown cruise in Safari is done, Apple needs to put these smarts everywhere.

More access for Siri AI

Apple’s also expanding the ability for Siri AI to access the contents of web pages currently loaded in Safari. This new set of custom actions lets Safari understand the complete web content of all open tabs. (Currently it can just look at what’s displayed on screen.)

So for example, you could ask about content that’s way down on a page you’re looking at. Currently Safari can’t answer if it can’t see it, but in 27.3 it’ll be able to parse the entire page and find the answer.

Siri AI can also now take direct actions on your Safari tabs and windows, including moving, sorting, and organizing them. So you could ask Siri AI to put all your cooking tabs in a tab group, or sort a bunch of Amazon product pages by price, or close all those Amazon tabs. You can also add items to the Reading List and even ask Safari to clear your history, including per site.

These new features all appear in iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, and macOS 27.3. The first developer betas are now available, the public betas should be available in the next few weeks, and Apple expects 27.3 final to ship to everyone in December.

By Jason Snell

Siri Recap and Live Rewind debut in watchOS beta

With the release of the first developer beta of watchOS 27.3, Apple is unleashing the last of its Audio Intelligence features on the world: Siri Recap and Live Rewind join Sound Recognition and Music Recognition (a favorite watchOS 27 feature of mine).

These other two new features have been met with a lot of skepticism, as they walk right up to the edge of making your Apple Watch a device for covert recording.

Live Rewind allows an Apple Watch Series 12 or Ultra 4 user to double-click the Digital Crown and get a quick transcript of everything that’s been spoken over the previous 15 seconds. Siri Recap generates AI summaries of every conversation it has been privy to.

Apple, obviously aware that this was going to be an issue, generated an entire Audio Intelligence white paper detailing how the features are secure and private. In general, audio is not recorded (per se), but buffered into a “secure exclave,” a portion of the watch’s chip that cannot be accessed by the system at large, and processed into text. That text is also encrypted and sent to the iPhone that’s paired with the watch, so only that iPhone can receive it and provide more sophisticated AI processing. And any cloud-based models used to generate summaries are part of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which means they’re end-to-end encrypted and discarded after processing, so nobody (not even Apple) can see the data.

As 27.3 arrives, a few other details have emerged. Siri Recap text, which is based on conversations captured by the user by setting a time frame for capture or manually capturing via Control Center, is deleted after seven days if it’s not used. The user receives notifications on their watch when Siri Recap starts and stops, and a reminder is pushed to the user’s iPhone at the end of the day, pointing at the generated recaps, which are stored in a new Recaps tab in the Siri app.

The Apple Watch itself processes the audio with a “lightweight” ML model that detects if the audio it’s hearing is actually a conversation you’re a part of. (It really doesn’t want to attempt to recap other people’s nearby conversations. If you’re listening to audio on headphones, it takes that as a cue and doesn’t monitor any audio.)

If the audio passes that test, it’s encrypted and transferred to the paired iPhone, which turns it into “condensed text” (some filler words are removed). Then that text is encrypted and passed to Private Cloud Compute, which filters out sensitive personal information and other red-flag content and generates a summary, which is returned to the iPhone for display in that new tab. No content is attributed to specific speakers, and speakers aren’t even identified by name.

Live Rewind is comparatively simple: You double-click the Digital Crown, it makes an audible chime and displays text of the last 15 seconds. That’s done by transferring audio to the paired iPhone, which processes it and returns text to the watch, which displays it for 30 seconds and then throws it away unless the user specifically chooses to save it.

Though these features clearly rely on processing on the iPhone as well as Private Cloud Compute, there’s no option to just record audio on the iPhone and have it generate these summaries. Apple seems to think that a microphone that’s always out in the open (on your wrist) is just a better tool for this kind of feature. Unfortunately, the reliance on the iPhone does mean that if you have two iPhones—perhaps sharing a phone number using iPhone Handoff—only one of them can actually be paired with the Apple Watch, and if that iPhone is out of reach, these features won’t work.

By Jason Snell

OLED iPad mini review: A modern multitasker

My favorite thing about the iPad mini is that it’s easy to love in all sorts of different use cases. It can be an e-reader or a bedtime TV or pretty much anything else you can imagine, right up to being a very tiny productivity device. It’s whatever iPad you want it to be, and everyone who has fit one into their lives seems to love it.

The new iPad mini is like that, too. But it’s added a few new tricks that make it better at most of the tasks people already used the iPad mini to perform. It’s got power, a beautiful new display, and fits in even more places than before.

The OLED display’s the thing

With this update, the iPad mini joins the iPad Pro among iPads sporting OLED displays. While the iPad mini’s OLED is not as spectacular as the Pro’s tandem OLED Ultra Retina XDR, it’s still pretty impressive, with 1200 nits of peak brightness, more than twice that of the previous model.

As detailed in my interview with two Apple executives about the iPad mini, the entire product was built around the OLED display. And that decision has some nice knock-on effects: By replacing the old LED-and-backlight display tech with OLED, Apple also gains some weight and space savings, allowing the iPad mini to be thinner (only 5.4mm) and lighter (255g for the Wi-Fi model). And the display, which measures 8.5 inches diagonally, is actually a little larger than on the previous model, thanks to smaller bezels.

Apple’s also now offering a nano-texture option (a $100 upgrade, and only available on the two higher-end models) for the front glass, a coating that provides powerful anti-glare capabilities. Put together, the brighter display and anti-glare coating do make this the best iPad mini ever at numerous outdoor activities—including the one it’s perhaps best suited for, as an ultraportable reading device. Choose wisely, though—I found that the nano-texture glass did also deprive me of the blackest blacks that OLED can offer. If you don’t run into glare problems in using your iPad, it’s probably not worth the trade.

Alas, the display only refreshes at 60Hz, rather than at the 120Hz rates of Apple’s ProMotion displays. This will disappoint some people, though as someone with multiple ProMotion devices in my life, I didn’t really notice or mind on the iPad mini.

We have always been at war with ingress

This iPad mini is the first iPad ever to receive a rating against dust and water ingress: IP67. This doesn’t mean you can swim with the iPad mini, but it does mean that if your kid drops it in the bathtub or you’re using it on a utility pole in the middle of a dust storm, you should probably be okay.

For people using the iPad mini in a variety of environments, that will be a win. For people using it as an e-reader, it certainly means you can probably get away with using it in the bathtub or by the pool—a win of a smaller, but still important, sort.

As a part of the job of restricting ways water and dust can intrude on the interior of the iPad, Apple has removed the traditional speakers from this iPad mini and replaced them with something it’s calling the Acoustic Display. It comes in two parts: First, two ultra-small tweeters are tucked just at the two narrow edges of the display, right between the edge of the glass bezel and the metal that rings the device’s sides. You’d never even notice them if you weren’t looking for them. These provide high-frequency audio (and stereo effects if you’re holding the tablet in a horizontal orientation).

Second, there are drivers for mid-range and bass that are on the inside of the iPad, coupled to the display itself. The vibrations that comprise those frequencies move through the display glass, which transmits them into the air. Your whole iPad mini display becomes part of the sound system.

It works pretty well. No iPad mini ever will win awards for audio fidelity, but I was able to crank up “Atomic Blonde” and listen to some crunchy punching with stereo placement, and play “Norwegian Wood” and experience distinct stereo separation of sitar and guitar. Yes, when it gets loud you can feel the iPad vibrating… but I’m pretty sure that has always been the case when you hold a small device that’s making a load of noise.

More power than a MacBook?

A couple of months back, after the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo were introduced alongside the A20 Pro chip they both use, I mused about how powerful an A20 Pro-based MacBook Neo would be, while lamenting that we might not see one until 2028.

I still have no idea what Apple’s MacBook Neo plans are, but for fans of the iPad mini, there’s no wait required: That same A20 Pro chip is now installed in this new iPad mini. That means, yes, that the new iPad mini is more powerful than a MacBook Neo—and may remain so even when the MacBook Neo gets an update next year.

This goes to perhaps the most important point when considering the iPad mini: Its ultimate strength is, as Apple says, its versatility—or to put it another way, the iPad mini is not a broken iPad or a baby iPad or half an iPad. It’s a whole iPad. That A20 Pro chip is powerful enough for all sorts of tasks. Perhaps with the exception of some esoteric high-end tasks that require the power of the M4 or M5 processors found in higher-end models, the iPad mini will do whatever iPad jobs you throw at it. It’s a complete, capable iPad—but tiny.

Not all iPad minis are made alike: The $699 (128GB storage) and $799 (256GB storage) minis actually use a five-core version of the A20 Pro, with two super cores and three efficiency cores. The $999 model (512GB storage) gets the same six-core (two super, four efficiency) A20 Pro as the iPhones. I’m not sure you’d notice, but there it is.

Every iPad mini gets to take advantage of Apple’s N1 chip, which brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to the iPad, in addition to Thread. And cellular versions (an additional $150) will now use Apple’s own C2 chip.

This model also marks Apple’s final acceptance that horizontal is the best iPad orientation, completing the task of relocating every iPad’s Center Stage camera to the long edge so you can properly frame FaceTime calls in landscape mode. It’s just better this way. (Though, Apple, a product note: If I’m using my iPad horizontally and I’m talking to someone holding an iPhone vertically, maybe automatically adjust my framing and cropping so I’m properly oriented on their screen and not letterboxed?)

Not priced like a unitasker

These iPads are not as cheap as they were. (Though what is, right?) This new model starts at $699, and escalates rapidly from there. The model Apple sent me for review was the top-of-the-line 512GB storage model with cellular and nano-texture glass, which will set you back $1,249.

These prices are extremely high if you consider the iPad mini a unitasker. If you’re thinking about buying one to read ebooks, well, even a pricey Kindle tops out at about $320 and the excellent Kobo Libra Colour is $260.

This iPad mini is a full-featured product at a full-featured price. If you’re only going to use it to do one or two things, there may be better options. But the thing about iPads is that they are flexible and malleable, and you can use software and accessories to make them be what you want them to be. If you’re planning on using an iPad mini as an e-reader, but also an RSS reader and for light email and web browsing and maybe watching a TV show sometimes and in a pinch maybe editing some video… now you’re getting it.

Pair a Bluetooth keyboard and write with it. Add a trackpad and multitask with it. Attach it to an external display. Dress it up in the new (very nice) FineWoven Folio Case like it’s an iPad Pro wearing a little business suit. The value is in the flexibility.

The reason the iPad mini has earned the love and loyalty of a wide array of users is that it’s tiny, portable, and does everything an iPad can do—and that’s a winning combination. This new model has a great new screen, and is thinner and lighter than ever. It’s certainly not cheap, but there’s a lot of value packed in there—if you’ve got a plan to take advantage of it.