Over the years, I’ve had a few iPads: iPad Air, iPad Pro 11”, and now an iPad mini. I must confess: iPad mini is my favorite.
When Apple updated the iPad mini to be in line with the design language of iPad Pro and the iPhone 12, the iPad mini finally found it’s ideal form. Before this iteration, the iPad mini had big bezels at the top and bottom for the home button and front-facing camera. Now, the bezel is smaller and the same width along the entire edge of the device. This bezel free space is the perfect amount of space to grip the device without your fingers covering the display. The screen size also slightly changed to 8.3”. The iPad mini supports the second generation Apple Pencil which magnetically attaches to the side. It also has a magnet pattern on the back similar to iPad Pro, so it supports a more compact version of the folio case (which doubles as a stand).
I’ve been using iPad mini for a year now, and it didn’t dawn on me until months into using it why I loved it so much—it’s roughly the size of a book. The size of books are great because you can easily hold them in a variety of ways no matter what you’re doing in life. You can hold them with one hand, two hands, hold them with a finger or two while you’re laying on your size, curl up with them on the couch or on a flight. The book has been optimized over the centuries for a typical human hand size and the ergonomics of everyday life. My phone is usually in my pocket while I’m on the go, but if I’m stationary looking at a screen, the iPad mini is the most versatile form factor. It’s big enough to support multitasking, comfortably browse the web, use full size apps, and leisure gaming. Also, ironically, it’s the size of a book, so it’s great for reading!
Where my laptop, or my desk workstation, are for serious productivity, my iPad mini represents leisure time where I don’t need the manic (sucks on cigarette) use of my phone or the serious productivity of a laptop. It’s big enough to relax into, curl up with. This is something that I think we miss from modern technology—ergonomic form to support lifestyle where technology takes a backseat. Phones have gotten too big and hardly fit in our pockets anymore even though phones are best for on the go computing. TVs dominate rooms even when they sole function of the room is not watching TV. While the slow creep of technology into our lives is certainly part of this dysfunction, I think it’s more so caused by our demanding technology do everything.
Before modern technology, most products had single or few intended uses. Postcards were big enough to convey a meaningful message—not so small you could get away with a short message or too big recipients were burdened with reading a novel. Cookbooks were big enough so you could see what you were cooking at a reading distance of a few feet. When technology isn’t purpose built like this it ends up always being present. But this general purposelessness, I think, makes technology worse. When devices do fewer things, they encourage us to context switch from activity to activity—intentionally. We move from mode to mode, maybe reposition, physically go to a place more suited for that activity. While we don’t need to do this, I think it’s more human. There’s a fundamental human impulse to move between scenes, interface with them for a given function, and move to the next one. These scenes come together with interfaces, textures, and environmental details that signal their intended activity and help our brains switch. If we thought about technology this way, as a part of a scene rather than the scene itself, I think we’d minimize the amount of bad, all consuming technology that we can’t escape. In Hello Tomorrow on Apple TV+, they surprisingly (surprising because Apple) have single use case technology that’s embedded in their environments. People don’t carry around phones or wear smart glasses even though they have robot bartenders and floating cars. I think that’s the appeal of retro futurism—it’s an aesthetic that returns to human, ergonomic, more textured design while still infusing technology in a magical way. More of that please!