Apple introduces iPad mini built for Apple Intelligence

I have an older (but not old) Mini, and I find it almost unusable, as screen elements don’t scale up. For example, Safari browser buttons are stupidly small. Is that still an issue with the Mini?

I am not sure I understand what you mean by the scaling issues, so, I guess, no? I have the 6th generation. The problem I have (and I do not see getting improved, somehow) is that applications do not care for it. Many times I have to turn it to landscape for some more room to fit everything. Most applications feel better on landscape, but then you lose vertical space. Affinity Photo 1 is very guilty of that, having buttons overlay each other on the left.

The mini display is 326 PPI vs 264 PPI for larger iPads, but the same scale factor so things will always be smaller. (iPhones with even higher PPI use a 3x scale.)

That said, you can embiggen things like Safari browser buttons under Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Larger Text.

I'd also suggest playing with the setting here if you just want everything to be scaled up a bit: Settings > Display & Brightness > Display Zoom > Larger Text.

Thank you. Larger text does just that and in some cases makes buttons even more difficult to use. My eyes are fine, and my fingers are big…unfortunately rendering the Mini mainly useless for me.

Elements such as buttons and scroll bars are too small for my big fingers and relative to the size of the device.

Yes. The mini feels like an abandoned product. In landscape mode, the keyboard takes more than half of the screen. UI elements are routinely covered up in various apps. For example, in Flighty, the flights "drawer" cannot be hidden in the way it can on the iPhone. This is probably fine in a larger iPad, but on the Mini, it covers more than half the screen, meaning it HIDES THE AIRPLANE ICON of the flight you're tracking. Apple Maps has a similar behavior with its drawer in portrait mode, but, IIRC, at least that one can be hidden.

I've owned 8 or 10 tablets in my life and never gotten along with any of them. The Mini6 is my latest experiment, and it's my favorite, but I still find myself rarely using it.

I wish Steve was still alive to have a rampage through the org and humiliate and fire all those responsible for this type of BS

Have you tried using the floating keyboard? I exclusively use it on my iPad not only for saving the screen real estate but also because I can swype on it (even though I can touch type on the big on-screen keyboard just fine; I still find it more convenient to swype with one of my thumbs, or the pencil https://support.apple.com/en-us/111789