While Apple spent a lot of time detailing the various specs and features of its new large tablet, the iPad Pro, on Wednesday, its following announcement of the little brother, the new iPad Mini 4, was much more of a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment. In this article, we look closely at the small slate which seems a much more meaningful update than you might initially expect.
At Apple’s big media event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Phil Schiller, the Cupertino company’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, was succinct in introducing the fourth iteration of the iPad Mini. Just after displaying the new pricing structure for the full currently-available iPad range, he asked: “So what’s the iPad Mini 4? Well, simply, we’ve taken the power and performance of iPad Air 2 and built it into an even smaller Mini enclosure”.
Close inspection of the officially published tech specs of the iPad Mini 4 largely back up his claims. Though the device actually uses an A8 chip in place of the A8X chip of last year’s well-received iPad Air 2, it has that larger tablet’s M8 motion coprocessor, fully laminated display and antireflective coating. The amount of RAM in the iPad Mini 4 has not yet been reliably specified; however, given that the new Apple TV both runs on an A8 processor and, as reported by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, includes 2GB of RAM, it is likely that this is also true of the iPad Mini 4.
Very out of character, Apple has listed the new AppleTV’s RAM amount in the documentation (it’s 2GB)
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) September 9, 2015
Unlike almost every other product Apple announced on Wednesday, the iPad Mini 4 is already available to buy – at least through Apple’s website. Nonetheless, it is not yet widely available and so early hands-on impressions of the tablet are thin on the ground. We were, however, impressed at the tablet’s performance in a test-run by PC Mag. As you can see by the online tech magazine’s video below, iOS 9 and the new Split View feature, where two apps can be displayed and worked in side-by-side, are present and seem to run as smooth as butter, with no discernible lag.
If you have already ordered your iPad Mini 4, or intend to do so, one worthy warning is that many of the accessories, such as cases and screen protectors, you may have bought for older iPad Mini models won’t be entirely compatible with the iPad Mini 4 due to its subtly different dimensions; it is both noticeably thinner and slightly longer and wider than all three of its predecessors. Thankfully, new accessories especially designed for the new small slate, including Apple’s own Smart Cover and Silicone Case, are already available, with a wider choice of accessories almost definitely on the way. They do say good things come in small packages…