Apple (Hacker News):

Apple today unveiled the all-new iPad mini, featuring a stunning OLED display in an even thinner and lighter design, a huge leap in performance with A20 Pro, and water and dust resistance. The larger 8.5-inch OLED display, also available with a nano-texture option, delivers higher contrast and more than 2x higher peak brightness than the previous-generation iPad mini for a brilliant and immersive viewing experience.

[…]

The new iPad mini features an innovative Acoustic Display for an even better audio experience when gaming, watching videos, or editing content. Specially designed woofers are paired through the display to produce punchier bass and more volume. In addition, custom tweeters are now hidden between the glass and aluminum enclosure for clearer highs.

[…]

The 12MP Center Stage front camera is now on the landscape edge[…]

[…]

With iPadOS 27.2, iPad mini also supports extended display mode when connected to an external display, great for users multitasking with windowed apps.

John Voorhees:

The new iPad mini comes in Midnight and Starlight colors (fewer than before) and starts at $699, which is less than some rumors suggested, and can be configured up to $1,249 before accessories.

Before the recent price hikes it was $499. The MacBook Neo is also $699 (including keyboard).

John Gruber:

Still stuck with Touch ID — a bummer in general, and a shit sandwich given how expensive these have gotten. Unless Apple decides to make a mini-sized iPad Pro (which I definitely do not expect), there’s no way to buy a mini-sized iPad with Face ID.

[…]

This is the first iPad Mini with an XDR display. But: no ProMotion.

[…]

The new Mini is thinner (5.4mm vs. 6.3mm) and lighter (255g vs. 293g for Wi-Fi models). The display is slightly larger (8.5″ vs. 8.3″) while the footprint shrunk slightly, because the bezels have been reduced by 25 percent. The iPhone Duo weighs almost exactly the same (254g to be exact) but its inner display is only 7.6 inches diagonally.

Ryan Christoffel:

In fact, every configuration except the highest 512GB model includes a less powerful, binned A20 Pro chip.

According to Apple’s tech specs page, here’s the breakdown of the A20 Pro across different storage configurations.

Rui Carmo:

I very dearly want to go back to the Mini since the Pro is too large as a permanent companion device, but the inflated pricing is not helping. and neither is my feeling that Apple has likely nerfed the hardware in ways that matter to me.

Previously:

• iPhone Duo
• Apple Hardware Price Hikes
• iPad Air (M4, 8th Generation)
• iPad Pro (M5, 8th Generation)
• In Praise of the iPad mini 7
• iPad (11th Generation)
• iPad mini (7th Generation)

Hartley Charlton:

Apple today marks 25 years since the introduction of the original iPod, one of the company’s most significant products and a major contributor to its expansion beyond the Mac.

Tony Fadell:

A small team. An unforgiving deadline. We had months to bring the hardware, software, and music experience together. Proud of what we built and that it means so much to people still today. A device that has been woven in many ways into our lives. People have filled their iPods with road trips, breakups, workouts, special occasions with family and friends.

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News):

Apple Music has a 404 page easter egg on the web: a functional iPod that appears when you load a page that does not exist, such as music.apple.com/macrumors.

Nick Heer:

This looks enough like my own iPod library circa twenty years ago that it threw me a little. I hope this is not appearing solely for the occasion of the iPod’s anniversary. It is a nice surprise.

Previously:

• Apple Music’s New Look
• iPod at 20

From the bright minds that brought you FTX Arena and NBA Top Shot NFT maketplace (where sales last month dropped to $762,781, which is a 99.66 percent decrease compared to the February 2021 peak of $226,350,843), the NBA announced Monday that it has new "preferred" prediction market deals for Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as a memorandum of understanding with the US CFTC about how to manage the relationships. It also announced an expansion of its DraftKings deal to include prediction markets, and says that more expansions will be announced with others soon.

The NBA is already facing scandals after Jontay Porter pleaded guilty to conspiracy …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Federico Viticci:

Don’t like that the iPhone Duo doesn’t auto-lock when you close it?

You can fix it with this simple Shortcuts automation.

Two steps:

• A conditional for when the iPhone is Closed.
• Lock the screen.

I mentioned in my review that I kept closing the Duo expecting it to lock, like when closing a book (or a laptop, for that matter). And it didn’t occur to me that I could simply add this feature via Shortcuts. That’s cool. But I also mentioned in my review that I wouldn’t want that to happen every time I closed it. Sometimes you do want to just switch from the wonderful inner display to the miserable little outer display, and the last thing you want when you do that is to need to re-authenticate for the hundredth time of the day with Touch ID. It was just a wrong instinct I had, and I broke myself of that instinct after about a week or so of full-time Duo use. I stopped expecting it to lock on close. So while I think this shortcut is worth pointing out — and I especially think it’s a good reminder to think about Shortcuts when you find yourself wishing for features that aren’t in Settings — I recommend trying to break yourself of this habit if you have a Duo and find yourself with the same wrong close-to-lock instinct I initially had.

Update: Stephen Robles posted a clever version that only locks the Duo on close if it’s on the home screen; if any app is open, it stays unlocked. That’s much more tempting to try. (He includes that one in a whole video full of Duo tips on YouTube.)

★

Simon Willison: “Battle Drones is heavily vibe coded — I’ve reviewed almost none of the code, and it’s built in a language (TypeScript) that I’ve hardly used myself.” There’s a French steampunk version too.