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Apple iPad mini 3 Review

4.0
Excellent

The Bottom Line

The Apple iPad mini 3 is a superb small-screen tablet, but you can get essentially the same experience from its predecessor for $100 less.

MSRP $399.00
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Pros

  • Beautifully built.
  • Fast.
  • Sharp screen.
  • Excellent app options.

Cons

  • Pricey.
  • Few reasons to buy over the less-expensive, still-available iPad mini 2.

Blink and you might have missed it. The iPad mini 3 made an especially quiet debut at Apple's latest event, a mere footnote compared with the iPad Air 2. With the dust now settled, it's easy to see why—aside from a gold paintjob, Touch ID sensor, and Apple SIM, the $399 16GB mini 3 receives no substantive upgrades over last year's iPad mini 2 , which gets a sizeable price cut to $299 for 16GB. One hundred bucks is a lot of money to shell out for what amounts to a small convenience or outsized vanity. New tablet buyers should snag the discounted-and-renamed iPad mini 2, one of our top picks for small-screen tablets, while existing mini 2 owners have very little reason to upgrade. 

Design, Touch ID, and Apple SIM
The iPad mini 3 is physically identical to its predecessor (7.87 by 5.3 by 0.29 inches and 11.68 ounces), save for the accent ring surrounding the new Touch ID button. There's also a new gold colorway to go along with the existing silver and space gray options. The gold here matches the gold finishes of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It's no longer the thinnest or lightest tablet in town—that honor belongs to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 ($629.99 at Samsung) —but it's still arguably the best-looking and best-built small tablet.

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Apple uses the same 7.9-inch, 2,048-by-1,536-pixel IPS LCD featured on the mini 2. It's an undeniably high-quality panel that's towards the top in terms of brightness and sharpness, but it doesn't benefit from the same optical bonding or anti-reflection upgrades that come with the iPad Air 2. It also doesn't impress quite like the Tab S 8.4's 2,560-by-1,600-pixel AMOLED display, with its infinite contrast, incredible max brightness, and vibrant colors.

Apple iPad mini 3 vs Galaxy Tab S

The mini 3 starts at $399 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only model, with 64GB and 128GB options for $499 and $599, respectively. The cellular radio equipped models start at $529 for 16GB and go up to $729 for 128GB. 

There are two new features of note for the mini 3: Touch ID and Apple SIM. The former is familiar at this point, having debuted with the iPhone 5s last year. It works with the same reliability and ease we've come to expect. But I'm not sure it's quite as useful here as on the iPhone for two main reasons: I don't constantly check for updates on a tablet, and my thumb doesn't rest right over the Home button whenever I use the iPad. Security is essential on a smartphone that travels everywhere, and Touch ID is a revelation in terms of convenience, since I typically my phone locks every time I power the display down. My tablets hardly ever leave home, though, and I typically set them to lock only after extended periods of dormancy. It's still faster to use Touch ID over a PIN code, but I don't think it adds enough to justify the $100 premium.

Touch ID will work with Apple Pay, which sounds like a big deal on paper. But in this iteration, there's no NFC; you can't hold the tablet up to a reader at a store to pay for something, like you can with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Here, Apple Pay is restricted to online shopping and really just a shortcut for remembering and typing in passwords. If you do a lot of online shopping, this addition will be more significant.

Then there's Apple SIM, which lets you use a single SIM card regardless of which carrier you choose to use for cellular data. Instead of having to go to the store and replace your SIM card, you can go straight into the Cellular Data settings menu and add a new account for your desired carrier. While useful, it's more of a niche play—I'd be curious to see what percentage of tablet users switch their carriers on a regular basis.

Performance and iOS
While the iPad Air 2 gets Apple's latest silicon, the A8X, the iPad mini 3 uses the same 64-bit, 1.3GHz Apple A7 SoC found in the mini 2. The recurring theme here is that the mini 3's biggest competition is the mini 2, and on the performance front, the mini 3 offers no advantage over its predecessor. The tablet never felt slow in my tests, but it's disappointing to see the mini lag behind the larger iPad. With this decision, Apple is steering power users towards the larger iPad. And as app developers start to take advantage of the A8X's power, it's possible the app experience could degrade for mini 3 owners. That's an important distinction between the Air 2 and mini 3, especially considering just how long people tend to hang onto their tablets.  

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In our battery rundown test, which streams a YouTube video over Wi-Fi with screen brightness set to max, the iPad mini 3 lasted a decent 5 hours, 45 minutes. The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 lasted a close 5 hours, 30 minutes in the same test.

The mini 3 comes with iOS 8.1 installed out of the box. Apple added new features like widgets in the notification shade and extensibility, but the overall experience should be familiar for Apple users and easy to learn for anyone new to touch-screen interfaces. Read our in-depth iOS 8 review for the full details.

Like every iPad before it, the mini 3 is still, at its core, a window into the world of iOS apps. Android has made strides, but sheer numbers don't tell the whole story—apps made for the iPad simply look and work better for tablet-sized screens than apps typically written for Android tablets. iPads also make it easier to create things, be it music, video, or other projects; its app selection is unbeatable. But since the iPad mini 3 has the same underlying hardware as before, that app experience will be indistinguishable between the mini 3 and mini 2, while the Air 2 reaps the benefits of the faster A8X chip in the form of quicker load times for intensive apps. 

Conclusions
The Apple iPad mini 3 is a superb small-screen tablet, but the modest upgrades, combined with a healthy discount for last year's nearly identical model, make it difficult to recommend wholeheartedly. The mini 2 is 25 percent less expensive than the mini 3, and I can't make a strong case for Touch ID or Apple SIM warranting the $100 premium. The two new features are convenient, but ultimately expendable. The iPad has always been about the apps, and the app experience between the mini 2 and mini 3 will be largely the same.

If this year's iPad stratification is the new normal, that means Apple no longer makes one tablet in two sizes, but now has two distinct classes of iPad. The iPad mini is the smaller, value-driven option. To that end, the iPad mini 2 offers much better value than the mini 3.

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About Eugene Kim

Analyst, Mobile

Before joining the consumer electronics team at PCMag, Eugene worked at local news station NY1 doing everything from camera work to writing scripts. He grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from the University of Virginia in 2010. Outside of work Eugene enjoys TV, loud music, and making generally healthy and responsible life choices.

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Apple iPad mini 3