The radically more expensive iPad mini

I've been borderline fixated on the cost of the iPad mini for the past few years. The price has been creeping up, and every rumor about the next-gen models always suggested they would get even more premium (and bring bigger price tags).

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.