rnb2

I currently have the 13 mini, having owned the 12 mini before it. I'm in the Upgrade Program, and the 13 mini is the first iPhone I've kept for more than one year since the Upgrade Program started with the iPhone 6 in 2014. I'd already broken myself of the "latest and greatest" pattern by getting an iPhone 8 Plus instead of a X (I didn't want to pay that much for a phone and wait for developers to figure out how to work with the new design), then an 11 instead of the 11 Pro. The XS was actually the last high end iPhone I owned, between the 8 and the 11.

I've loved carrying a small iPhone for the last (almost) three years. I love the way it slides easily into a front pocket, even with my wallet attached. I love how light it is, and how comfortable it is to hold, especially with the wallet adding some depth. I've never used a case with my minis in order to maintain the "small as possible" footprint, and have never regretted it.

That said, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to keep the 13 mini for a third year, and the small screen has started to feel cramped and limiting. This might just be my brain trying to trick me into accepting the tradeoffs I'll experience with my next phone, though. When I got the 12 mini, I was all about smaller devices: first, the tiny iPhone in 2020; then, replacing my 11-inch 2018 iPad Pro with an iPad mini 6 in 2021. This year, I decided that I just had too many things that would benefit from a larger iPad screen and grabbed a lightly-used M1 iPad Air (and sold the iPad mini), and now I'm debating between a 15 Pro and 15 Plus. On the one hand, most of the high end features (but not the longer zoom of the Max), which I haven't really experienced in a few years; on the other hand, a really big screen and lighter weight. I'm leaning toward the latter - if I'm going to lose out on the pocketability of the mini, I might as well go big, right? - but won't be able to completely decide until after the event.

With any context at all, this is a rather pointless review (I get it - everybody has bills to pay). Until last year, the only options for desktop "Retina-class" displays were the sad collection of LG Ultrafines — usually described as "nice panel; shame about everything else, including the price" — and the $5k Pro Display XDR. It's nice that Apple is back in the game, but the Studio Display is hardly feature-rich for its price, and the number of people with an extra $1.5-2k on hand after spending a lot less than that on a Mac mini/MacBook Air or a lot more on a MacBook Pro/Mac Studio can't be huge. It certainly wouldn't be at the top of my list if I was looking to buy today, even with the extra pixels over the vast majority of the competition, and it seems a bit silly to suddenly decide that 4k isn't workable (either at the default "looks like" 1920x1080, or the scaled "looks like" 2560x1440 that I've used on my 4k screen for over 4 years) when the available 5k options were so mediocre for many years. Apple's expensive option doesn't automatically become the best for everyone just because of the extra pixels.

This specific BenQ display is a bit odd, as Thunderbolt adds significantly to the price, but doesn't bring a ton of benefits these days. It probably makes the most sense for a MacBook Air owner looking for a 1-cable solution that also charges the laptop, since the 65W limitation is a bit low for the MacBook Pro (though it will certainly work, depending on how hard you're working the CPU/GPU). For anyone with other easy connection options - USB-C, DisplayPort, or HDMI - you can get similar features for a lot less, or more features for a similar price. The review would have been more useful by concentrating on that issue and comparing it to similar displays without Thunderbolt than spending so much time on it not being "Retina".

Mike Wuerthele said:

rnb2 said:

According to a Reddit thread, the SMB issue seems to be connected to custom icons on the network shares. Once I mapped my shares directly to folders instead of the drives (which have hard-coded custom icons via SoftRAID), hunted down any custom icons within the shared folders, and removed any custom icons from the backup jobs that copy from my MacBook Pro to the shares on my Mac mini server, SMB started working reliably for me again. I only encountered the issue after upgrading to 13.2. 

That may be one aspect of it, but the small businesses we spoke do don't have any custom icons at all, for anything.

Yeah, it sounds like some are experiencing something different that started with 13.0. Maybe only the 13.2 issue is connected to custom icons?

According to a Reddit thread, the SMB issue seems to be connected to custom icons on the network shares. Once I mapped my shares directly to folders instead of the drives (which have hard-coded custom icons via SoftRAID), hunted down any custom icons within the shared folders, and removed any custom icons from the backup jobs that copy from my MacBook Pro to the shares on my Mac mini server, SMB started working reliably for me again. I only encountered the issue after upgrading to 13.2. 

I'm not sure most here have actually read Gassée's piece, honestly. At no point does he actually advocate turning the iPad into a Mac, and he seems generally to miss the simplicity of the iPad as originally envisioned.

While I agree that iPadOS has failed to keep up with the astonishing hardware it's running on, I do think that the current iPad lineup is a bit mystifying. Each piece makes sense in isolation, but as a line of products, it's hard to ignore that there is one demonstrably cheap, old-fashioned option, one really expensive, "only for the serious user" option (the 12.9" Pro), one small one, and three that look almost identical but have a strange mix of missing/different features. It's in that middle ground, where most of the sales are, that I think things have gotten a bit muddled, largely because Apple is no longer content to let any iPad just be an iPad, and instead is designing all of the mass-market versions as "iPads that aspire to be laptops", with compromises in the design in that direction.

The iPad reached its tablet ideal with the iPad 2 and the introduction of the Smart Cover in 2011. While some people obsessed about protecting the back of the iPad, I never thought that made much sense. I tried going with a back cover on the iPad mini 4, when Apple offered back covers to match the Smart Cover, but the added bulk and tackiness weren't worth it. Folding a Smart Cover on itself to create a ridge to curl your fingers around gave the best grip, and I could hold any iPad up to the 10.5" Pro that way for hours.

With the advent of the 2018 Pros, though, the design with magnets along the spine for a Smart Cover gave way to the flat-sided design with magnets throughout the back of the device for the heavier Smart Folio, making for a device that became a bit uncomfortable to hold over time compared to earlier models (particularly with heavier 3rd party folios). The introduction of the Magic Keyboard in 2020 justified that direction for the Pro devices, but then the Air went the same direction for reasons that are still a bit confusing, even more-so now that they've put an M1 in the Air. Why is the Air, originally introduced as a narrower and lighter upgrade to the original form factor, now a cut-down Pro? Wouldn't it have made more sense to keep the Magic Keyboard as a Pro-only accessory for those that want their iPad to pull laptop duty on a regular basis?

Now the 10th Gen iPad has been introduced with the same basic design as the Pro and Air, but with oddly-timed (landscape camera) and oddly-implemented (Smart Connector on the edge allowing for a cheaper, but not cheap, keyboard) changes that nonetheless leave us with a device that is very similar in-hand. While the Smart Connector positioning means that we could see the return of the Smart Cover, the magnets throughout the back of the chassis for the kickstand also encourage the continuation of the Smart Folio concept (and Apple's exorbitant $79US pricing, worse elsewhere) instead.

I understand wanting to have a keyboard option for the "base" model, but $249 makes that a tough sell with a $449 device, and we've ended up with no iPad (bar the mini) that is, first and foremost, an iPad. That is, a tablet that you hold in your hands while relaxing in a comfortable chair, couch, or bed. The Air should really have the edge Smart Connector like the 10th gen, which would at least make the expensive keyboard make a bit more sense, since it could then be used on more than just the 10th Gen iPad. Introducing the landscape front camera on the Air would also have allowed a bit more margin for the engineering to solve the Apple Pencil 2 question instead of punting that and keeping the original Pencil around. With the edge Smart Connector, anyone wanting to use an iPad primarily as a tablet could get a Smart Cover instead of the heavier folio, and would have a choice between the 10th Gen and the Air.

My own experience went like this: I'd had a 2018 11" Pro since summer 2019, when I bought it in spite of my dislike for the weight of folio cases. I used it for 2+ years before moving to an iPad mini 6 when they were released in late 2021, but after a year, I decided the mini was really too small for some of my use cases (I mostly read on my iPads, but a lot of that is PDFs of magazine-size books which are too small on the mini). I could almost have lived with the 10th Gen, but Pencil 1 was a killer, since I use the Pencil 2 extensively. I snagged an 11" Smart Folio for $20 (Apple's are the lightest, but ridiculous at full price), so I had my choice of 2018 Pro, 2020 Air, or 2022 Air. I tried the 2018 Pro first, but surprisingly found Face ID a bit irritating after a year of Touch ID on the mini - Face ID only unlocks the iPad, but you still have to swipe up to get to the Home Screen, whereas Touch ID goes there directly. I found that I actually liked Stage Manager for keeping two equal-sized windows side-by-side on the 11" (Split View won't do an equal split in portrait), and also like the display scaling on the Pro and M1 Air, so I ended up with a very-lightly-used 64GB M1 Air in the end, but it still feels like overkill for what I do with an iPad.