iPad Mini Design and Display
The iPad Mini has an 8.3-inch screen, which is smaller than the 10.2-inch regular iPad and the 10.9-inch iPad Air. But it’s bigger than the 7.9-inch screen in the last iPad mini thanks to the removal of the home button.
The new iPad mini owes much of its design and feature set to the fourth-generation iPad Air, Like the Air before, the mini does away with the classic, Home button-based design of the previous generation in favor of a variation of the iPad Pro design: it doesn’t have a physical Home button and comes with a Liquid Retina display. And, again, like the Air before, the mini doesn’t rely on Face ID for authentication but instead relies on a Touch ID button placed in the top right corner of the device.
The bottom of the tablet is home to another key change: the USB-C port. Apple’s proprietary Lightning port is gone from this device, and it opens the door for interactions for the iPad Mini. You can plug in an external drive or a more universally acceptable dongle to transfer data. The real win, though, is that might let you clean up how many chargers you need to bring with you. There’s also a USB-C to USB-C cable in the box along with a 20-watt wall plug. And with the iPad Mini getting USB-C, it leaves the ninth-gen iPad as the only tablet to stick with a Lightning port.
iPad Mini camera
The new iPad mini has upgraded cameras and redesigned speakers. The camera system is a combination of parts from the iPad Air 4 and the latest iPad Pros. From the Air 4, the new mini inherits a single-lens 12MP rear camera with an LED flash—the upgraded image signal processor in the Apple A15 chip may improve its photos marginally compared to the ones that the iPad Air takes, but photos from each camera look similar overall. It is, however, an appreciable improvement over the 8MP rear camera in the 5th-generation iPad mini.
Perhaps more important than the rear-facing camera is the front-facing one, and it has gotten a pretty huge upgrade. Now, the iPad Mini offers the same 12-megapixel ultrawide camera as the iPad Pro, and it supports Center Stage. That’s good news — Center Stage is a genuinely helpful feature during video calls, and it works just as well here as it did on the iPad Pro.
iPad Mini Performance and Battery Life
The 2021 iPad Mini doesn’t just get a design refresh — it gets a performance boost too. The device actually comes with the same latest-gen chip that’s found in the iPhone 13 series — the Apple A15 Bionic. In other words, the iPad Mini is an excellent performer.
The iPad Mini is smooth and responsive, and not once did I experience any jumps, skips, or app crashes. It’s easily powerful enough for mobile gaming and heavy multitasking, and if it wasn’t so small, you could arguably use it as a laptop replacement. Creatives could make use of the device too — it should be powerful enough for most graphic design and basic video editing.
The battery life on the 2021 iPad Mini isn’t bad. Apple rates the iPad Mini as offering the same 10-hour battery life as the current-generation iPad Air, and in lighter usage, with the brightness not cranked, that seems about right. In real-world use, most should be able to get a few days of use out of the device before needing to charge it.
The iPad mini (2021) offering either 64Gb or 256GB configurations.
The price starts at $499 for the 64GB configuration, and you can upgrade to 256GB for $150 — which brings you to $649. LTE cellular connectivity costs $150 more, bringing the max price to $899.
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