I understand ram shortages but what is the justification behind selling the mini as a “pro” product? People want a smaller base iPad, that’s it.

One of my beloved devices was the Nexus 7, it was an excellent affordable template that didn't feel cheap, nor fancy or pro. Just a good media consumption / general purpose small tablet.

I wish Apple would make a similar device. I'm fine with recycled chips and getting a bit gimped on RAM size.

Like the MacBook Neo of iPads; I just really want a media consumption device. A20 Pro means nothing to me.

In what way are they selling it as a "pro" product?

By putting the A20 Pro chip in it rather than A16/A17/A18 which is on base iPads and iPhones.

That's not the same thing at all as "selling it as a Pro product". They just happened to put a chip in it which has "Pro" in the name, and which this press release accurately names. They're still selling it as an "iPad Mini" at the same segments and value props that they've always sold iPad Minis at.

And the "Pro" in the chip name doesn't mean anything anyway, "Pro" is actually the lowest-power suffix for A/M-series chips (behind "Max" and "Ultra").

Perhaps they are planning to launch application features that require or benefit from the A20. Anyway it looks like the base model of the new iPad is using binned CPUs that were not quite good enough for the iPhone 18: 5 cores instead of 6, 1 neural engine instead of 2.