Apple’s New iPad Mini Is a Powerful Throwback
A tablet that looks like 2016 but plays like 2019
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It’s been four years since Apple updated its iPad Mini, the pint-sized 7.9-inch tablet popular among children and professionals who need a screen large enough for work (or play) but small enough to slip into a coat pocket.
In that time, Apple has essentially rewritten its slab design language. The iPhone dropped its sharp edges in favor of an all-curved design, buttons traded mechanics for haptics to mimic movement, and screens flowed like water to the outer edges of each device.
Apple’s new iPad Mini, however, is a design throwback, thawed like Sylvester Stallone’s cryogenically frozen Demolition Man to tackle the tablet challenges of a new generation of users.
At a glance, the iPad Mini 5 is a match for 2015’s iPad Mini 4, right down to physical Touch ID button. That’s right — Apple has delivered a new tablet with a mechanical home button. In an era when the iPhone hasn’t had a movable home button since 2016, and when the iPhone XS and iPad Pros don’t even have home buttons at all, this decision is mind-boggling. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a fan of that button — but this is 2019, not 2015.
Even though it seems like Apple missed an opportunity to reinvent the iPad Mini, it does align with some of the decisions Cupertino has made on other recent tablet introductions. The education tablet has a mechanical home button and large bezels, and none of Apple’s tablets, not even the high-end iPad Pro, include the haptics-driven 3D Touch, which lets you press harder on the screen to access additional features.
Apple stuck with the 2,048x1,536 Retina display, which at this size looks fantastic, but it’s hard to ignore the large white…
