Gear

The iPad mini 2021 is great! But does its shine fade?

Apple’s smallest iPad has big ambitions, but we wanted to find out how it fared after a whole month of use

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Rating: 9/10 | Price: from £479 at Amazon, John Lewis and Apple
WIRED

Sleek, powerful and lightweight; design; supports second-generation Apple Pencil

TIRED

Display niggles; occasionally fiddly to use; poor for typing; carry a charger with you

During the iPad’s launch, Apple asked if there was space for a new category of device, squeezed between smartphones and laptops. For that category to exist, Apple said it would need to be better than the others at key tasks. Fast forward a decade and detractors still grumble about the iPad’s utility, but Apple’s sold over half a billion of the things.

Of Apple’s current range, the iPad mini most embodies the device’s original positioning. Its dimensions are roughly half a MacBook Air or two-and-a-half iPhone 13s. There’s no keyboard case – it’s not trying to be a laptop; but Apple Pencil support and an 8.3in display suggest more scope than a phone.

Even so, a nagging question remains: What is the point of this device? You already have a phone for ad-hoc tasks. You have a laptop for ‘proper work’. If you’re really into iPads, you likely already lovingly caress an iPad Pro, breathing in its screen acres.

By comparison to that device – or any other iPad – the iPad mini initially feels like a prank. It’s not weightless – and the design is solid – but the lack of heft is disarming. Only briefly, though, because it soon becomes freeing. And although the tablet’s not quite pocketable (unless you have comedy pockets), it’s more portable than any other Apple tablet.

Any suggestion the device is pointless vanishes once you start using it. Apple isn’t doing ‘compromise’. The A15 chip scythes through everything from high-end creative apps to console-style games. The revamped selfie camera supports Centre Stage, which combined with the iPad’s lack of weight makes it fantastic for video calls. The dual landscape speakers won’t make your stereo system sweat but still pack oomph for a device of this size.

The new design gives the iPad mini ‘blank canvas’/‘become anything’ appeal, rather than a chunk of the front face being taken up by a honking great Home button and massive bezels. The screen is bright, with excellent colour reproduction and is sharper than what you get with other iPads, which is handy since it’s used nearer to your face.

Yet it still somehow feels like an extravagance. Surely, your brain nags, you should buy a bigger iPad to do more with it? Using the iPad mini over a month, our question was whether one could be your only iPad – and whether that initial spark of joy fizzled once reality stomped in wearing size tens.

Some people will never get over the keyboard factor. If you’re the type of person who constantly makes an iPad pretend to be a laptop, the iPad mini isn’t for you. It’s defined by limitations: input devices and methods beyond tapping away at keys, and what you can do and achieve on a smaller display. 

And be mindful a smaller device means a smaller battery. Apple reckons you’ll get up to ten hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi. We found the mini does get through a day of light use, but work with power-hungry apps, play a lot of games, or ramp up screen brightness and you’d be wise to keep a charger handy.

For those lighter tasks – like browsing, reading and social media – the iPad mini is great, because it’s so light. You are more likely to get mobile versions of websites in portrait than on other iPads (although you still sometimes get those even on the Air), but that rarely matters. It’s ideal for books. Magazines and comics? Surprisingly good, although you won’t be poring over double-page spreads in landscape. It was with such things that we were most tempted to stray to a larger iPad. 

Similarly, video lacks immersion – although even the biggest iPad is sub-optimal for films and TV shows. (That’s what your telly is for.) But should you get sucked in to media, you’ll delight in being able to hold the mini for hours without your arms wanting to fall off.

With its diminutive size, you might reason the mini is solely for consumption, but you’d be wrong. It’s well-suited to people who’d otherwise have to lug about weighty documentation (or a weightier device), its 293g (4g more for the cellular edition) being barely heavier than a large smartphone and case. But that A15 combined with the iPad’s unparalleled app ecosystem also lets you get things done.

For many tasks, you’ll need an Apple Pencil (£119) for the best experience, so factor that in. Sausage digits get in the way on a smaller display, but Apple’s second-generation scribbler provides precision when marking up documents, smashing out mind maps for upcoming projects, drawing and painting, or blazing around the internet and jotting down ideas using iPadOS 15’s smart new Quick Notes functionality. All this can be done away from a desk and a traditional set-up, which can help you think more freely. That never gets old.

Beyond that, you’re probably not going to want to edit videos, podcasts or complex layered imagery on a mini – but you could. LumaFusion, Ferrite and Affinity Photo work well enough. A bigger surprise is found in GarageBand and Korg Gadget, with music-making being surprisingly joyful on a display that’s just big enough to afford flexibility, on a device that lets you quickly get ideas down wherever they happen to strike. That also never gets old. 

Writing is where things fall down – two-thumb typing in portrait is fine for short emails, but never improves when you’re composing longer texts.

If you like mobile games, this iPad’s powerful enough to run anything, but there are niggles. Virtual controls are fiddly when not optimised, and your fingers can get in the way of the action. (We increasingly wished for a telescopic controller like the GameSir X2, but with 2cm of extra stretch powers to accommodate this tablet.) Also, the mini’s new 3:2 aspect ratio means developers must recompile their wares to make them full screen. Right now, most games (and some apps, including Affinity Photo and Comixology) have small black borders at the tablet’s shorter edges. Progress in fixing this has been slow, and our experience with the iPad Pro 12.9in suggests many games will never be updated. Wasted space is, though, more noticeable on a smaller screen.

There’s one other issue with the display: jelly scrolling. That’s less tasty than it sounds and refers to screen skew/lag when scrolling, the picture snapping back once you stop. The internet decided this was a ‘rake in face’ moment for Apple, but it’s something all LCDs suffer from. However, it is more obvious on the mini because the controller board is oriented vertically rather than horizontally. (Put an iPad Air or iPhone 12 Pro Max in landscape and you’ll see similar lag. You don’t get it on iPad Pro and the iPhone 13 Pro because their displays refresh at 120Hz.)

But does it matter? Not really. Many people won’t notice the effect, although if you’re bothered by such things, do visit an Apple Store and frantically scroll web pages up and down on a mini before plonking down your cash. And be warned: go looking for jelly scrolling and it could ruin for you every display that refreshes below 120Hz.

So should you buy the iPad mini – and could it be your only iPad, or even your only non-phone device? The latter’s a stretch, but the former is viable depending on what you want to do, especially when taking into account the iPadOS app ecosystem that propels the mini far beyond the Fires and Galaxy Tabs of this world.

In short, if you own and love an iPad mini, this upgrade is huge and worth the 80 quid price hike over its predecessor. If you want a portable, lightweight low-compromise iPad experience, it’s superb. If you’re flush and fancy a second iPad for carting around, reading and scribbling, it’s ideal. But if you’re wedded to a keyboard, look elsewhere.

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK