Hands On With the iPad Mini With Retina Display

I've seen the iPad mini as a tough sell for a while, and I'm concerned that the new model doesn't get any easier. The new mini is slim, sleek, and fast. It's a smooth little tablet. But it's not competitively priced by any measure, so it'll be a real test of how much people want those iOS apps.

I feel like I wrote this last year. I probably did. The mini's key problem is that it keeps pace with the competition, but at $399, it costs $170 more than the $229 Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HDX. This year's model matches the competition's screens and beats them on processor power, but it doesn't change the game in any way.

This year's mini is slightly thicker and slightly heavier than last year's, in service of the bright new Retina screen. I didn't feel the difference - it's still a very slim, very light tablet - but I noticed it later when I checked out the spec sheet.

I'm still not a big fan of the wide-ish screen, which I find harder to hold in one hand than the Nexus 7, and it's a little heavier than the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HDX.

The sharp 7.9-inch, 2,048-by-1,536 screen has 326 pixels per inch, the exact density of the iPhone 5 and 5s screen and pretty much the same as the Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, which show 323 pixels per inch. Like on all of those tablets, the graininess of the old mini's screen is gone.

Text and images appear super-smooth. Pinch-to-zoom pinches and zooms incredibly quickly, incredibly sharply. Off the top of my head, I don't remember other tablets being quite so smooth, especially at scrolling or zooming - it's something I'll really want to compare side by side.

Want to show off something new? I looked for something that would show the glory of the 64-bit A7 processor and settled on Star Walk, an augmented-reality astronomy app. Star Walk can redraw star maps in glorious high-res as quickly as you can whip the camera around, which is quite a feat.

The new iLife and iWork apps are also handsome. The new mini runs all of the same apps, in the same resolution and I'm pretty sure in the same way as the big iPad, which is its major selling point. Everything I could do with the big iPad, I did on the mini, just as smoothly.

But I didn't feel the same surprise and joy handling the mini that I did with the iPad Air. Maybe it's the opposite of the Air's experience: picking up the Air after years handling "regular" iPads, it practically flies out of your hand. Its light weight is a happy shock. Picking up the new mini, on the other hand, brings you back down to Earth.

Also, $399 is a harsh price to pay for the Mini. Unlike with the larger iPad, the mini has good-enough competitors that are much cheaper. The Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HDX are powerful, easy-to-use tablets with a good array of apps. Phablets also compete with small tablets, and the Samsung Galaxy Note III and 6-inch Nokia Lumia 15206-inch Nokia Lumia 1520 will likely run $299 or less with contract.

That makes the mini question very unlike the iPad Air question: here you have to ask, why should I pay much more for an Apple product? Without anything really disruptive here, the answer has to be the apps and the pure smoothness of the software experience. How long can Apple rely on that lead?