Last year when Apple announced the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, it also announced that the original iPad Mini would continue to hang around at a new, discounted price of $249. Today, after eight months, Apple has quietly delisted its old, relatively cheap tablet from the online Apple Store.
One the inside, the two-and-a-half-year-old Mini was actually a lightly modified version of the four-and-change-year-old iPad 2, which Apple stopped selling in early 2014. The Mini was the last iOS device Apple sold with a non-Retina display—the rest of the lineup, from the iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6 to the iPod Touch, is all Retina at this point even, though the Mac lineup is still making the switch.
Even with the price drop, it was difficult to make a case for buying the first-gen iPad Mini in 2015. The iPad Mini 2 was dropped to $299 at the same time, so spending an extra $50 got you a much better screen, twice the RAM, and approximately four times the processing power. That's a lot to turn down. And while both tablets will run iOS 9, the iPad Mini 2 will support some of the operating system's new multitasking features and the original Mini won't (there will no doubt be some other features that older hardware misses out on, too).
If you do still want an original iPad Mini for whatever reason, the tablets are still hanging out in the refurbished section of Apple's online store (they start at $209) and at retailers at Best Buy, at least for now. But even then we'd steer you toward a refurbished iPad Mini 2 ($249) or, if you have the cash and want the full range of iOS 9's multitasking enhancements, the iPad Air 2 ($419). We'd also counsel you to ignore the iPad Mini 3, since all it adds is TouchID and in-app Apple Pay support—features we don't think are worth an extra $100 to most people.
reader comments
50