Apple iPad mini with Retina Display: Reviewed

I suppose there’s only one way to start this review, and that’s by looking back at last year’s iPad mini review. In that review I had a section dedicated to the possibility of an iPad mini with Retina Display. The low resolution display and slow SoC were my only two real complaints about the first iPad mini. I listed a bunch of options that Apple had for the mini going forward:

“Apple has preferred outright quadrupling of pixel count (2x in each dimension) to create a Retina Display. With the mini's display using a 1024 x 768 resolution, this option would give it a 7.85-inch 2048 x 1536 panel. That would be the same resolution as the iPad 3/4, but in a much smaller display giving it a pixel density of 326 PPI (vs ~263 for the iPad 3/4). Apple could do this, but it would then need to make all of the same changes it made in going to the iPad with Retina Display, primarily the introduction of a larger battery and much larger SoC. The bigger battery is needed to drive the more powerful backlight, and the X-series of SoCs is needed to actually render the UI and games at such a high resolution. Both of these things would increase the size and cost of the mini, which would make it distinctly un-mini.”

What I wrote last year was more or less what Apple decided to do this year, had I stopped there I wouldn’t have ended up with egg on my face. Naturally I didn’t. At the end of that page I concluded the following:

“None of these options is particularly enticing for Apple, especially given the low (for Apple), starting price for the iPad mini. If you're expecting next year's mini to have a Retina Display, I wouldn't hold your breath.”

And this is why I don’t like making predictions.

I hadn’t expected display power to go down as much as it did. I didn’t think battery density would improve as much as it did. And I definitely didn’t think Apple would integrate a large 4MB cache on its SoCs, thereby reducing the need for a super wide memory interface. The combination of those three things made giving the iPad mini a Retina Display possible, and that’s exactly what Apple did this year.