[Prestidigitweeze]

Apple kit can be a bit like a fine artist's version of a chair: Gorgeous to look at, revelatory in its minimalism, and even refreshing to play with for a time. But in the end it can prove to be a costly deviation from practicality that ends with the user needing to return to a normal chair.

Still, I think it's too easy to discount the experience of using the Mini in the name of pure specs and brand aversion.

I don't feel I'm in a position to judge the Mini because I haven't actually used it. Apple has a way of seeming worse on the page than in the hand, which is one reason people always laugh at their newest devices and wrongly predict they'll fail. (That's almost as delusional as lining up to pay to be a beta tester for an overpriced electronic device which still has bugs -- Apple at launch, but a lot of other companies, too.)

The Mini does sound under-spec'd for the current market, esp. considering the ironic position Apple's in this time: following as opposed to initiating or spinning a trend. It's also underwhelming considering what's about to happen to iPad 3 pricing and the availability of Apple-refurbished 3s. If I were interested in a tablet with a Retina display, I'd find the iPad 3 far more affordable today than a week ago. Given that pricing change, I'd be even less inclined to pick up an iPad Mini.

Don't read below this line unless you're interested in music production.

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Of course, that's leaving out a need which I seem not to share with anyone else on MR: A UI made for composing music and a massive professional software library to use with it.

Long ago, people used to hire me to play and program the Fairlight and Synclavier, both of which cost between $50,000 and $80,000. Today, the same gentleman (Peter Vogel) who, along with Kim Ryrie, gave us the Fairlight now offers its most of its functionality on the iPad for $9.99 and its complete library of sounds for $50. The same goes for Native Instruments -- the people who make a lot of the software used on IDM and EDM. The Maschine control surface becomes the iMaschine and can still actually be used for creating complex beats. Ditto for NI's array of softsynths and instrument creation environments.

You can laugh at the blindness of Apple users all you like, but I'd be blind if I insisted on completely renouncing a platform that offered the most efficient software/hardware for my chosen field.

PCs are quite competitive when it comes to music production, so laptops are an entirely different subject. But when it comes to tablets, music production and notation, Android can't touch iOS (and has very little incentive to try). Ditto for Windows 8 for tablets, which has yet to build any sort of library and probably won't given the decline in big recording studios and the twilight of musical literacy.

Forget trying to notate music on an Android device -- especially with the urgency of a composer who's just had an idea for a quartet and wants to scribble it down in a hurry. Music software that involves sight-reading is a niche which no one wants to pump R&D into at this point, especially in a post-music-literate society. That's why Apple has a back-catalog which is still useful to many of us and -- for the fleeting moment -- still hasn't been sabotaged by their massive desertion of pro users. The scary part is that Microsoft seems to be following the same course.