Back in September, after Apple folded the iPhone in half, I asked a question in Surprise, Shine, and Sticker Shock: if Apple refreshes the iPad mini, what’s the difference beyond the obvious one, that one of them folds? Seven weeks later Apple answered it at its “Pro and Tell” event in Los Angeles on October 28, with an OLED iPad mini 8 and, after years of saying no, a touchscreen MacBook Pro.
Here’s what was announced, and what I made of it.
The short version
- iPad mini 8: an 8.5-inch OLED display, the A20 Pro chip, IP67 water and dust resistance, and a body that’s 5.4mm thin, down from 6.3mm. From $699, in stores November 6.
- MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display: Apple’s first touchscreen Mac, with an OLED panel, 120Hz ProMotion, up to 2,000 nits peak brightness, and a Dynamic Island along the top. M5 Pro or M5 Max, 14 or 16 inches, from $2,899. A maxed-out 16-inch, with 128GB of memory, 16TB of storage and nano-texture glass, comes to $14,549.
- M6 iMac from $1,499, and an M6 14-inch MacBook Pro with the regular Liquid Retina XDR display from $1,999.
The iPad mini landed where it needed to
The OLED screen is the headline, and it’s overdue. True blacks and higher contrast have been missing from the mini for years, so anyone who has been waiting for this can finally rejoice.
It’s still the odd one out in the lineup, though, and it comes with some obvious quirks.
- The tiers are tied to storage. The 128GB ($699) and 256GB ($799) models get a five-core CPU and one 16-core Neural Engine. Only the 512GB model ($999) gets a six-core CPU and two Neural Engines. If you want more AI performance, you have to buy storage you may not need.
- Matte glass is tied to storage too. Nano-texture is a $100 option on the 256GB and 512GB models only, so the cheapest matte mini is $899. How much storage you have has nothing to do with whether you want a matte screen.
- It’s 60Hz. A gorgeous OLED panel held back to 60Hz, when the hardware could likely have run at 120Hz, is a bit of a downer.
A touchscreen Mac is a solution looking for a problem
I’ve never been sold on touch laptops. Scrolling a page with a finger now and then is a convenience. Pinching to zoom all day on a vertical screen would get old fast. macOS will also need a lot of app-by-app adjustment before touch feels natural rather than bolted on.
Day to day, I’d avoid fingerprints on my screen like the plague. Less is more, and I’ll stick to my keyboard and mouse.
There is probably a group of people this is aimed at. Nothing in the keynote made it obvious to me who they are.
The Apple tax, unchanged
In September I called Apple “beautifully made, and goodness, is it expensive.” This event did nothing to change my mind.
At $14,549 fully loaded, the OLED MacBook Pro isn’t for me, but I can see who it’s for.
- Videographers on location. A powerful, reliable machine you can carry to a shoot, edit on site and deliver usable footage without missing a beat.
- Developers running large language models locally. With 128GB of memory, the top model can hold big models and respond quickly. The catch is that most of that work happens in the cloud, so I’d be curious to see how anyone justifies the cost against renting compute instead.
What’s on my desk
I use three Macs every day. Two are M4 Pro MacBook Pros I bought in early 2025, which are reliable, fast and last all day on a charge. They’re my work machines and I can’t live without them. The third is a base M4 Mac mini, the perfect little machine for tinkering and home use.
Nothing this week tempts me to replace any of them. The iPad mini, though, is the one I’d add. I think it would be a fun way to build with Claude on the go.
OLED for photo editing
As a film shooter who edits scans, I can see the appeal. Deeper blacks and much higher contrast should help when judging shadows in a scan, and the new MacBook Pro’s display supports both P3 and Adobe RGB colour. That said, I’ve never had an OLED monitor on my desk, so I can’t say from experience how much difference it makes in practice.
Final thoughts
If you’re deciding whether any of this is for you, here’s what I’d take away.
- Buy for the screen you’ll actually use. The iPad mini’s OLED is a real upgrade you’ll notice every time you pick it up. A touchscreen on a laptop is something you might use a few times a day.
- Watch for features tied to storage. Apple increasingly links unrelated features, like extra Neural Engine cores or matte glass, to bigger storage tiers. Work out which feature you actually want before you pay for the storage that comes with it.
- The top configuration is for a job, not a lifestyle. A $14,549 laptop makes sense if it earns money on a shoot or replaces cloud bills. If it doesn’t, the M6 MacBook Pro at $1,999 is the sensible Pro.
- Waiting is a strategy. First-generation hardware, like the touchscreen Mac, always has kinks to work out. My M4s have plenty of life left, and the second generation will be better and probably cheaper.
The mini is the right product at the right time, quirks and all. The touchscreen Mac is beautifully made, and I’ll admire it from a fingerprint-free distance.
Sources: Tom’s Guide live coverage of Pro and Tell, MIXED on iPad mini storage and chip tiers, Zeera Wireless iPad mini 8 review.