iPad Mini 3 vs iPad Mini 2 vs iPad Mini 1 Review: Comparison of Specs and Features, Worth Upgrading?

By Max Bonto, Christian Post Contributor Friday, October 17, 2014

Apple's keynote Thursday unveiled a lot of new Apple products like the OS X Yosemite, the 5K iMac, but most notably the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3.

This is the third-generation iPad Mini, but how does it fare against its predecessors and how far has it gone from the 2012 release of the first iPad Mini?

The first iPad Mini was released in November of 2012 and the October release of the iPad Mini 3 was expected and remains in line with the periodic annual releases by Apple.

The first iPad Mini had a 7.9-inch touchscreen with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. It was run by an Apple A5 chipset, a dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor and a PowerVR GPU. It was available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB variants and had 512MB RAM. It first came out with the iOS 6 and is still legible for the iOS 8 upgrade.

Next, the iPad Mini 2 was released a year after the first iPad Mini and was basically an upgraded version of the first iPad. It had the same 7.9-inch screen but with a higher screen resolution of 2048 x 1536. It was equipped with a more powerful A7 chip and was now running a dual-core 1.3Ghz processor. RAM got an upgrade as well jumping from 512MB to 1GB.

The iPad Mini 3 which was announced this week on the other hand looks like the iPad Mini 2 but now comes with a new TouchID fingerprint scanner, which has been features on the company's iPhone range.

The brief time spent by Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing, in introducing the new iPad Mini 3 was met with dismay. Basically, nothing is new about the iPad Mini 3 compared to the Mini 2 except for its TouchID.

While many people still see the iPad Mini 2 as a great device, it seems that Apple shifted its focus to the iPad Air 2, which was discussed in great length during the keynote, and had some design changes from the Air 1.