You’re not alone. But this is a classic business upsell scheme. They offer you not enough in size “small”, so you have to go for size “big”, as they only offer two sizes or they only offer small & big, with no decent “medium” option.
Welcome to the classic upsell. Coffee to burgers… similar rules apply. And yes, it sucks; especially on expensive electronics. 
These are not newly released models, in the strictest sense. They are the same design with speed bump processors and improved displays. Same thing applies to today’s announcement on 2019 iMacs that lack the latest T2 chip technology. Those will come when we see redesigned models in a year or two.
Sent from my iPad
-Al-
Yeah obviously. I meant after 3.5 years, spec-bumping the Mini 4’s internals, and basically keeping the old externals (design & port wise), at a cost that makes no sense once analysed beyond the headline pricing. They’re just not appealing, when one considers what’s already happened in iPad-land late last year.
With respect to the Lightning port, don’t forget about the current Apple keyboards and trackpads.
Yep, those should eventually get type-C’d too, if everything else bothers to make it’s way over. But given they’ve just released these bumped pads, I’d say that won’t happen for quite a while. Although with a new Mac Pro sometime this year, they may do them then (or not…this is Apple so it’s anyone’s guess!).
…oh yeah, plus given the general hatred for the butterfly keyboard in any iteration (2016/2017/2018 MBPs), I suspect they’d be thinking about where these are going to go too, before port-switching happens (again, but this is Apple Inc. in 2019, so don’t hold your breathe for them caring too much about that type of thing!).
That’s new to me, I had no idea this could be done, does iOS display any difference visually? An Ethernet indicator somehow?
I like the Logitech K811 keyboard, can connect to three different bluetooth devices with a simple key tap. My laptop, my iPad and my SE. I’ll be getting a simple cover for my new Air.
I have used my old iPad for work, and found that for large datasets, Photo Libraries, or big Excel files, it was no match for a laptop. So big DevonThink databases prove handy to have on there but the heavy lifting I did back on the laptop. The larger screen of the 12.9" would help a lot but it’s about the sheer amount of data, I don’t see iPads doing that particular job. For quick work, yes, it’s a pleasure, even a smoother experience, but scale is the issue.
In Settings, Ethernet is listed directly under Airplane Mode and Wi-Fi as in this screenshot:
My old iPad 2 from 2011 was insufficient for work purposes, over which the (2015) 12.9” iPad Pro was a “yuge” improvement. The larger screen is perfectly fine for my purposes, whereas I shall leave it to someone else to address your data concerns.
That’s really cool. I never knew that was there. 
I’m tempted to replace an old mini 2 that I have at home primarily for surfing and reading. It’s only 16 GB and it’s hella slow. I first thought I should get something with substantial storage, but since this is an iPad that’s lying around most of the time my wife doesn’t want us to actually spend real money on it.
The new mini 5 is very appealing to me and I guess $399 is ok. But I was thinking maybe 64 GB is not particularly future proof. We have lots of photos and music on it. I was very surprised that going to the next storage tier is an extra $150 (I thought I remembered that being $100) now bringing us to $549. With sales tax we’re going to be at $600 which guarantees my wife’s veto.
Then I realized you can buy a refurb 128 GB mini 4 for just $309. I consider 128GB rather future proof for our use. I’ve never been interested in Apple Pencil. I don’t care about the quality of the front camera, if anything we’d be using the rear camera. So at first I thought this looked like an awesome deal.
Of course that was until I realized the mini 4 still has a A8. Now both mini 4 and 5 come with just 2GB of RAM so no difference there, but an A8 does not strike me as incredibly future proof. Even my SE with its much smaller resolution and battery offers an A9 and I have a feeling we might see an iOS version that won’t run on an A8 anymore in the not too distant future.
I probably missed other differences (I don’t care about the minuscule weight difference or LTE bands, for home use I’d be getting the wifi version anyhow). But I have to tip my hat to Apple. They’ve priced these things exactly right to get people to spend extra money. The only problem is they didn’t consider my wife. I probably won’t be getting a new iPad mini just now. 
I guess you could argue a $429 128 GB iPad is a decent middle ground. Unless of course you actually want the compact size of the mini (which I do).
I agree on the pen with Illustrator, but I can’t even use Pages and Numbers on the Mac (compatibility issues), so I think it would be a no-go on the iPad.
Diane
I’m able to use Pages & Numbers and save files in Word/Excel on my iPad Pro, whereas I hardly use the Mac equivalent any more on my Mac mini… Sorry to be of little help!
That’s ok! I tried Numbers for a couple of years and it regularly chocked on formulas I used for work. At that time Pages wasn’t bad for me, but now I do typing with tables and have to exchange with someone who only uses Word for Windows so…… If it wasn’t for that I can deal with Pages.
Diane
I’ve currently got an iPad Mini 4, which I love. I’m gladdened that Apple has decided to refresh the Mini, but I’m unsure if it’s worth it right now to spring for the new version or maybe the new Air.
I am somebody who love the iPad Mini size - I have the Mini 4, and it is working fine for me. My wife also has one, and it also is fine for her. (Our mothers also both have one, and both use them as eBook readers as well as general web and app devices.) What I love particularly about the Mini 5 upgrade is not that I can go buy one now, as ours are fine - it’s that if something happened to one of our iPads and we needed to buy another, until Monday, we would have had to spend about $630 for a new Mini 4 with AppleCare+ and cellular and a four year old A8 processor. Now I can spend the same amount for a Mini 5 with a brand-new A12 that will receive iOS updates for far longer.
I have 128 GB storage now but don’t need it over 64 GB at all - with iCloud Photo Library and iTunes Match I have never come close to having 64 GB stored on the iPad at any one time. (It’s extremely rare that I use the iPad mini for listening to music anyway - for that I use either my phone or the Sonos app to listen in the house.) The only times that I come close to using more than 64 GB of storage are when we are taking a long airplane trip and I load three or four movies or Netflix episodes onto the iPad for watching on the plane.
I’m hoping that this announcement is the beginning of Apple reliably having one to to year hardware bumps on most of their products going forward. In fact, after years of Apple not being reliable about this (with the obvious exception of the iPhone and maybe the MacBook Pro), it does seem that in the last two years they have come back to this sort of update schedule.
As for an iPad Mini Pro - I’d never buy one, but I think it would be a great option. I do wonder, though, whether enough people who want a Pro iPad would really go for a Mini over a larger display to make it worthwhile for Apple to offer one.
While having a “middle option” would be better than nothing, I really think the base option should be 128 GB. Geeze, it’s 2019 Apple. Get with it!!
Upsell.
“Our new one starts at only x!”, when in reality, everyone knows they have to get the next one up from the bottom to get what’s usable.
@ Apple: like we can’t see through your marketing to figure this most basic of facts out. HAHA.
I know this probably doesn’t happen very often, but what happens if someone forgets to charge the iPad or it malfunctions?
Since the scores had been scanned as pdfs and just about always stored in a cloud service, they can easily be downloaded and printed out in a pinch. Which is a yuge improvement over the old days, as I recall a renowned pianist looking for a particular score in the library of my music school, because he had forgotten to pack it before going on a US tour from Europe!
Meanwhile, many orchestras also store scores and parts in Dropbox nowadays, so that members can download them to practice before the first rehearsal when real parts are used.
