When Apple’s new iPad Mini came out of the box, it was love at first sight. A cloud formed above my head, and I began to imagine all the wonderful adventures ahead with this tiny tablet: reading all of my ebooks, writing to-do lists with the second-gen Apple Pencil, streaming Ted Lasso (again), and FaceTiming friends while scrolling through social media—whenever, wherever I want.
It's easy to feel enamored with the thing. It comes in a few fun colors! It looks modern with slim borders around the screen, it has a USB-C charging port, and it's petite! Apple took its sweet time with proper upgrades to its smallest slate, but these improvements feel well worth the wait.
Then the love bomb wore off, and it didn't take long for reality to set in. I wasn't living out those fantasies. Perhaps partly because we're all still stuck in pandemic land. Instead of opening an ebook, I grabbed a paperback from my bookshelf. When I needed to jot down some notes, I reached for my Sailor Moon Moleskin and ballpoint pen. To binge-watch New Girl, I grabbed my remote. When hopping on a Zoom call, I opened my MacBook Pro. The iPad Mini stayed on my desk as a backup screen.
That's not to say the sixth-generation iPad Mini isn't excellent—it is—but for $499, it’s more expensive than any Mini that came before. I strongly suggest evaluating how this Mini will fit into your life before it ends up as yet another screen in your household. It has the potential to do anything and everything, but it's probably not going to replace your phone, laptop, heck, even your notebook just yet.
To engineer the iPad Mini, Apple pointed a shrink ray at last year's iPad Air. Probably. From the (almost) edge-to-edge screen, Touch ID integrated into the top power button, and the USB-C port, it's obvious where its inspiration came from.
The smaller build makes it so much easier to use one-handed than the 11-inch display on the Air or the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, especially if your hands are super small like mine. With both hands, it feels like I'm using a giant iPhone, specifically when typing messages or emails in portrait orientation. There's an 8.3-inch display here, which is larger than the 7.9-inch iPad Mini 5, but Apple managed to keep the tablet's body almost exactly the same.
It's small enough to throw into most bags or freely carry around with you. I had no problem squeezing it next to my laptop on my small desk crammed with tchotchkes, beverages, and notebooks. It's the perfect size for traveling. Thankfully, as this tablet is designed to be used on the go, its Liquid Retina display manages to get bright enough to see outdoors. Walking down the street while reading an ebook in broad daylight, the text was plenty legible on max brightness.