No, I am not hallucinating like some overly exuberant large language model. I know that 30 October 2023 was all about the M3 chip and the new Macs with some bonus attention to the iPhone 15 Pro, which was used to film the event. (An impressive one more thing-esque flex at the end.)
The iPad line wasn't mentioned or shown in the product shots — product shots that made room for the iPhone and Apple TV. While I did not do a frame by frame study, I'm pretty sure the Mini (and the rest of the iPad line) wasn't even seen.
So why bring this up?
A number of commentators have focused on Apple’s messaging associated with the M3 chips, which focused on users who still are using intel-based Macs and/or MI Macs — a much more reasonable group to try to get to upgrade than the M2 Mac owners who have bought in the last year.
The part of the messaging I want to focus on is where Apple talked about the kind of pros Apple expects to invest in machines using the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max — including not only the jobs (researchers v. programmers v. Video editors) but the kinds of software packages.
These guidelines may help those who wonder where they best fit in the M3 line up. Doubtless, this will help individuals and companies who want the best bang for their buck without defaulting to buying the most expensive machine they can.
Where this connects to my experiment with the iPad Mini begins is my absence from the list of target users for these computers. Neither Apple nor I think I need one of these machines.
That is not only good to know, it is potentially liberating.
There is a certain amount of professional pride (or ego) and desire for geek street cred that drives people like me to want to be associated with the pro computers. To begin, I am a full professor. I am in the top tier of 'pro’ in my profession — even thought most Professors of English are not pushing a Mac’s computing power.
And the kind of professional pride is not what Apple is trying to signal with the marketing title ‘Pro’. That title is a legacy of a time when all power users could and would gravitate to the same machine(s).
If I (and others) don't tie myself to the device with Pro in the title, that frees me up to consider devices like the iPad Mini. Considering the iPad Mini is making me rethink the implications of my input device(s).
It can let us all (Dare I say?) think different about our devices and how to make them better suit our needs rather than aligning with some predetermined paradigm that aligns best with what is easiest for a marketing department to package.
Incidentally, I hope you are going to be good enough to forget that I said all this if Apple releases a Mini Pro (one that permits Stage Manager’s dual screen set up).
I hope Apple continues this trend with its other devices. I would be very interested to hear the extended list of job classes that correspond with the devices they sell. There is bound to be overlap, of course. The iPad Air and the MacBook Air leap to mind here. I suspect their user profiles would primarily differ only in whether the user could better leverage iPadOS or MacOS.
Users will know if they need to take a step up to the "next level” of the benchmarked tiers of the chips and devices — whether it is due to a real need or a pride-based desire for the more expensive machine. But giving them these guidelines is a great step on Apple's part.