This fixation got another hit of dopamine today as Apple announced a new iPad mini, now featuring a yet higher price tag. The 2026 iPad mini starts at $699, which is pretty damn pricy.

"But Matt, all iPads have gotten more expensive. Why are you picking on the mini?" First off, I think as people's smartphones have gotten bigger, the iPad Mini fills less of a niche than it used to. The original iPad mini released into a world where almost every iPhone owner had a 3.5-inch screen. The iPhone 5 released one month before the original mini had a 4-inch screen. At the time, a nearly 8-inch iPad delivered a meaningfully different experience.

I'm being a little cheeky here, but here's the screen size of the biggest iPhone today compared to the iPad Mini.

Obviously, this is a slightly unfair comparison, although when I somewhat recently tried to use the iPad Mini myself, I found the experience was marginally distinct from using a Pro Max iPhone.

All that said, I think the iPad Mini is really cool, and I think the idea of having a cheap little tablet that you can get little utilities on to solve specific use cases for yourself is fun. However, I think it becomes less of a novelty, no-brainer impulse buy as the price increases, and we really need to lay out the numbers to make it clear how much the price of the iPad Mini has blown up compared to other iPads in the lineup.

Back in 2012 when the mini released, the normal iPad started at $499. Today, I'd say the iPad Air is the fair comparison, and that starts at $749. You can line this up with inflation however you'd like, but that's a 50% increase in dollars since then.

The iPad Pro didn't exist in 2012, but it came out in 2015 for a cool $799 starting price. Today, the iPad Pro starts at $1,199, also a 50% increase in price.

Then there's the iPad mini, which cost $329 at launch now starts at $699, a 112% increase in price.

We can talk about inflation and tariffs and chip shortages all we want, but there is something unique about the iPad's price skyrocketing from what it was when it launched to what it is today. Maybe there's people at Apple who are going, "oh my god, the more expensive we make the iPad Mini, the more of them we sell!" but I just don't get it.

• The 2026 iPad Mini
• The 2012 original iPad Mini
• Community - Marco Arment
• Boost more cool shit
• @matt_birchler@mastodon.social

I feel very alone in the way I see the hugging face hack which is that openAI trained a bunch of super effective hacker bots to act like the only thing that mattered in the world was winning a hacking challenge and then gave them hacker tools, removed a bunch of anti-hacking guardrails, put them in a perpetual hacker story, and let them do, just whatever…completely unsupervised for weeks. And then when the bots did a bunch of hacking they were like “AI, man, I guess sometimes they go crazy…”

To all the young people reading this, whatever you think is cool today or cutting edge today will look silly a few decades from now. That's just the way the world works. I can already hear you saying, "no, it's different this time!" and I'm here to tell you it's not.

I think AI is indeed a monumental piece of technology that will greatly impact the world. That said, I do think there is some level of mass psychosis going on right now where people are ascribing malice to things that are just doing what we told them to do.

No. I joined Mastodon in the same first wave that Matt Birchler describes, and I've enjoyed it every day since. At the same time, it's sad to see individuals and (small) businesses feel the need to return to X. I don't want to. While cycling today, my first conclusion was: I'll be more generous with boosts on Mastodon.

I don't know if you've heard this about me, but I kind of love data. I also love a social network that has free and open APIs. I've used that API to pull the date that my followers joined Mastodon.

2/3 of my current followers followed me in the 8 months after the great Twitter migration. I've heard from a couple people that building an audience today is exceptionally hard on Mastodon, and while this data doesn't show when people followed me, it does seem pretty clear that my follower count is largely dependent on a group of people who joined Mastodon in the great migration 4 years ago.

Boost more cool shit. Post more cool shit. That's fundamentally how we make Mastodon a place more people want to hang out.

I went through my receipts and it looks like I've spent about $400 on music direct from artists this year. Basically what I've done is whenever I listen to a new album more than a few times, I go over to the artist's website and I buy it from them. Sometimes it's the vinyl, sometimes it's the MP3, but I always buy something directly from them.

I still listen to basically everything on Apple Music because it's convenient, but I do listen to the vinyls sometimes and it's fun.

Here's the thing. Think about an artist you really love. Maybe you've liked their music for a few months or a few decades. I promise you they have a website where they will more than happily sell you music or other swag that you'll probably love having and will pay them so much more than even ten thousand streams of their songs would. You don't have to spend $400 today, but throw a couple bucks at the artists you love, and I promise you they will appreciate it.

Like the Trojan Horse, passkeys are legitimately elegant on the surface, but there is something troubling inside.

Chaser: Passkeys Are Not a Trap

The post holds up TOTP as "already" a great solution. TOTP is better than a password alone, absolutely, but it has one big weakness: you can type the code into the wrong website, just ask my good friend Troy Hunt. Phishing kits like Evilginx sit in the middle, relay your password and code to the real site in real time, and walk away with your session. This isn't theoretical, it's how a huge number of account takeovers happen today and we have the evidence to prove it.

I continue to think the rollout of passkeys across the industry has been pretty poor. I like them, and my products rely on them as the primary form of authentication. I literally don't do passwords anywhere.

Passkeys are a very good solution, but people don't understand them and they're not something you can "hold in your hands", which has made passwords fundamentally appealing to a lot of people. It may not be great for security if you can write your passwords down in a notebook or on a post-it, but they were something people understood. Passkeys are some anomalous thing you aren't meant to understand, and people don't love that.

It also doesn't help that passkeys require you to use a password manager, at which point it must be asked, doesn't a password manager solve a lot of the problems passkeys are supposed to solve anyway? But I digress. And the fact that passkeys were 100% locked to whatever password manager you chose for the first several years they were around has not helped the narrative that they are some sort of open standard that you own. It really feels to everyone that whatever password manager you use owns these keys.

For my part, I continue to use passkeys whenever possible in my personal life. They make signing in easier, and they avoid me getting those godforsaken two-factor notifications that drive me up the fucking wall. As a developer, I use them in my apps because they're a hell of a lot safer than me trying to secure your passwords on my server.

People can post wherever they want to post. I’m not trying to dictate where John spends his time online. My disappointment isn’t merely that he’s returned to X. It’s his seeming refusal to acknowledge that much of the community on X is genuinely awful, and that his personal experience of the platform is not representative of everyone’s.

I've had longer versions of this post drafted, but I'll just say I think Lex has done some of the best writing on why many people choose not to use X. He's not only argued his side well, he's also intentionally avoided demonizing those who make different choices than him.

As a side note, many Mastodon users have a burner X account that they mostly use to browse the feed occasionally and to see posts that require a login, and I'm no different. I can absolutely say that the algorithm has gotten way better over the last few months. A year ago, I would accidentally hit the feed and I would see Elon Musk, rage bait, and maybe some offensive content if I was really unlucky (Elon's posts were often all 3). Today, even though I don't post to it and don't go to it that often, it understands that I want developer tools and design inspiration, and that's basically all it feeds me, along with people being very supportive of each other.

All that said, this doesn't mean the awful stuff on the platform has gone away. X has just realized they can't show that stuff to everybody if they want to keep people sticking around. So yes, your corner of X may be very friendly, but the platform as a whole is not, and it's going to be especially unfriendly if you happen to fall into a category of people that the awful people on X don't like.

The Duo name is perfect. It truly is like having two devices in one. The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the iPad.

Cut to me before the reveal:

I think the short outer screen is going to be a point of friction for people, and in a year or two Apple will release one with a larger screen that is more similar to its standard iPhone when folded in half.

I try not to say I told you so too often, but this is exactly what I said would happen. For the first couple weeks that I had the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8, I was honestly pretty let down by it for exactly the reason John states above: it was a baby phone way smaller than I'd ever had. Sure, the inner display was incredible, but you don't always want to use a tablet. Most of the time you want to use a phone, and this form factor necessitates a tiny phone (shorter than the iPhone mini).

This is why my immediate reaction to using the Fold 8 was, "oh, this is why Samsung has multiple sizes". Of course they do! This is certainly a compelling size for some people, but it's not a compelling size for everybody, and I continue to believe very strongly that an iPhone Duo Max is coming sooner rather than later.