Using the first iPad Mini in 2020 – Review

The ipad mini was introduced all the way back in 2012 and brought a design never before seen in the ipad line all in a smaller form factor hey how's it going i'm josh from 91 tech and today we're taking a look at the first ipad mini how does it hold up eight years later the ipad mini essentially looks like a shrunk down version of the ipad air but interestingly it actually came out the year before making it the first major redesign to the ipad line besides the ipad 2

Assuming you consider the ipad 2 to be a big change this ipad was quite popular both as a budget option and one for those who didn't really need a full ipad but still wanted something a bit bigger than a smartphone don't forget back in 2012 iphones had always been 3.5 inches up until the 4 inch iphone 5. so although this ipad mini doesn't feel much larger than my 11 pro max it is significantly bigger than an older iphone too bad this ipad mini didn't age as well as the 2012 iphone 5. ios 9 on it isn't exactly a pleasant

Experience and yes this one has a pretty brutally cracked display and i apologize for that i bought this years ago back when i wasn't getting that much money from youtube and it was cheap and so i picked it up for a video and as bad as it looks it actually doesn't impede the experience too much and i don't really use this in my day-to-day life anymore so i did use it for a while as a streaming player before i got a bigger ipad slash macbook slash etc

These were great netflix and youtube machines and they're not even terrible today but let's take a moment here and go over the design of the first ipad mini or should i say the ipad mini in general because the design up to the fifth generation really hasn't changed much we have a basic thin and a light aluminum body with a 7.9 inch display and resolution of 768×1024 this is non-retina which means even without the crack in it the screen really doesn't look that good you can see pixels and the crispness you expect

From ios devices just isn't here below the screen is the home button which serves as a plain old home button without touch id this is a bit annoying now because if you want security you'll need a passcode but for 2012 it was the norm heck apple didn't even introduce touch id until the next year the ipad mini did come in a couple colors slate and silver the slate was removed the next year and replaced by space gray which is the one i have here black and slate was on the iphone 5

As well in my opinion it's a gorgeous color when the condition of the device is pristine but unfortunately with use the paint tended to chip away too easily i also like the space gray though so no harm no foul again this essentially looks identical to the newest ipad mini 5th generation being sold by apple right now so in that sense it actually has aged pretty well assuming you're ignoring the poor performance and fuzzy looking display battery life i will say actually is pretty decent which makes sense

Considering the underpowered hardware and decently sized 4 490 milliamp hour battery keep in mind this is essentially a bigger iphone 4s with a worse quality albeit bigger display so there's not a ton of power to push i'd say most of these things should be able to pull out a day's use if not more when it comes to light streaming use or web browsing which is probably all you'd be doing with an ipad this old anyways and we'll talk about all that but first let's look at the camera we've got cameras on the front and back

The rear sensor boasts a full 5 megapixels and takes just beautiful photos that sarcasm it doesn't is the camera an important part of the tablet probably not for most but that doesn't make these photos any less disappointing it's the same camera as in the 5th generation ipod touch and i honestly think they should have just put the 4s's 8 megapixel sensor in here but maybe that would have raised the price i don't know considering it's from 2012 and a tablet i'm not too unhappy about the

Camera we're somehow able to take 1080p video with the ipad mini and well it's about as bad as you would expect and definitely doesn't look high definition although technically it is back in the day what was more important than how good the video was is that it took video in the first place so i can give it a pass the selfie camera is pretty low quality with 1.2 megapixels same again as the 5th generation ipod touch while this doesn't look good today it's very of the era and so there's really no

Complaints i can make after all it served the job for facetime or whatever you needed it for all in all while they could have put a better camera on the back they didn't need to that said using this thing eight years later definitely don't take photos with it honestly i'd say just don't use one of these in general anymore probably a good tip but there could be a few use cases for it and we'll get to that but first let's take a look at the hardware the ipad mini features the iphone 4s a5

Chipset and 512 megabytes of ram this isn't exactly a powerful device and ios 9 causes it to struggle with even the most basic of basic tasks this is mostly down to the ram not the chipset the a5 back in 2012 was actually still fairly impressive in terms of performance which is why apple seemed to be cramming it in all their devices left and right unfortunately due to the dual core nature of the processor giving it more life it resulted in apple over updating it basically they kept giving it updates until it got slow

If there were ever evidence of apple pushing planned obsolescence the idea where they're trying to slow down old devices to force you to buy new ones the best example is any device with an a5 chipset the iphone 4s the ipod touch 5 the ipad mini the ipad 2 the ipad 3 these are all very slow devices and they never used to be ios 9 ios 8 even ios 7 really just started to bog all these things down and with all the new features the old hardware just couldn't keep up i would argue that planned obsolescence

Has been debunked for the most part with the 5s getting six years but yeah if you want a reason to slam apple these devices are a good start when initially shipped with ios 6 the ipad mini was fast and fluid but not so much anymore that said thanks to the relatively recent software supports you can download fairly recent versions of most apps really the only practical use i can see for the ipad mini anymore is streaming media youtube netflix amazon prime and so on unfortunately disney plus isn't

Compatible with ios 9 but this thing could still be somewhat useful if you already have one definitely don't want to go buying one of these things anymore can we speed this ipad up at all well actually kind of with jailbreaking we do have options like shortening animations and whatnot but we can also dual boot with an older version like ios 6 or even fully downgrade to ios 8. so there is some life that could be squeezed out of this thing if you had to or if you're interested in jailbreaking this is just a great device to mess with cydia really hasn't changed a whole lot

Since the older ios days and so if you want to get into it pretty much any older device is an option but the truth is even for streaming a 7.9 inch ipad mini generally isn't going to appeal to very many people even the ipad mini 5 currently being sold by apple is barely ever marketed and is just kind of there for the small base that's interested in it it also doesn't really make sense in their lineup why would you buy this ipad mini when you could get the 7th generation ipad for less money regardless if you do have one of

These stuffed in a drawer somewhere i'd encourage you to pull it out and mess around with it it's always fun for a nostalgia trip and who knows maybe you'll actually find a use for it because as old as these things are they aren't completely useless it's too bad that ios 9 ruined this ipad because the hardware was actually great for the time this was a thin super light device sized in between the iphone and ipad that was really appealing out of curiosity how much do one of these go

For nowadays well turning to ebay.com we're looking at around 60 to 80 dollars for a fairly well used device besides the worry of how battery life is this is honestly just too much for what this ipad is worth at least in my opinion the size is perfect for some i understand that but the value is just not there and you'd be better off spending your money elsewhere trust me don't buy one anymore they're too old if you have one already that's a different story and definitely use it to its full

Potential if you can and want to but with that i think i'm pretty much about done here the ipad mini was a really good fit in the lineup for 2012 and while it is still there today it's not nearly as prominent or relevant iphones have gotten bigger and because of that the need for an ipad mini just really isn't there anymore that said this ipad did manage to get 4 years of ios support and it isn't completely useless 8 years later and that's honestly impressive in and of itself did you ever have the first ipad mini let me know in the

Comments down below if you found this video interesting maybe hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content just like this you can follow me over on twitter and instagram at 91 underscore tech if you'd like to for some reason we also have a discord link in the description thank you so much for watching i'm josh from 91 tech and i will see you all next time you