One day I'm going to have to[note]I say 'have to' in the sense that Apple's incessant tweaking of their product lines will once more strand the iPad Mini line far enough away from Apple's main line of iPads that I strongly suspect I'll find myself faced with a range of iPad Pro-branded models to choose from when the time comes to replace my current machine.[/note] upgrade from my current iPad Mini 4[note]Not the feature-bump from last year, the original 2015 model with a less powerful CPU and lacking Apple Pencil support.[/note] to some variant of an iPad Pro and I'm going to face the dilemma of how badly I want/need to turn my iPad into an iPad Borg:
The BoltHub essentially "bolts" - really, it sort of clamps - onto the top right of your iPad Pro in landscape orientation, with an ominous-looking, short-run USB-C cable connecting it to the USB-C input. Once attached the device gives you a 4K HDMI slot, one slot each for Micro SD and SD cards, a plain old USB 3.1 port running at 5GB/second (suitable for thumb drives), a USB-C passthrough port to make up for the one you gave up to attach the BoltHub, and even a 3.5mm audio jack to replace the one that Apple so bravely omitted.
Have to confess the iPad Borg designation fits the BoltHub so well and I'd completely missed it. The iPad design just doesn't look like it needs anything added to it, and yet it so plainly does. The BoltHub looks so wrong, and yet they've clearly tried so hard to make it look as unobtrusive as it can given the hardware limitations.
I reckon that barring accidental damage I'm probably going to get at least another year's use out of my iPad Mini 4 before either the feature set of iPadOS 14 or fading battery life on my current device forces my hand on a replacement machine. Who knows, perhaps by the time I have to face this Apple will have Sherlocked the makers of the BoltHub by offering a similar device of their own? Different vendor, same issue.
[Via Subtraction.com]