Apple Announces iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3
At their big event today, Apple officially announced the long-awaited iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, along with a 5K Retina iMac and upgraded Mac Mini.
The new iPads are the most relevant to the focus of this site, so I’ll spend some time talking about them here. Luckily, unlike with last year’s iPads and this year’s iPhones, the decision of which model to get this time is very simple.
The iPad Air 2 – A Gaming Powerhouse
No two ways about it, the iPad Air 2 is a gaming powerhouse. The A8X chip represents a 2.5x improvement over the previous model – in other words, a 250% performance improvement. The display maintains a 2X pixel density, rather than upping it to 3X, meaning all of the extra graphics horsepower goes directly to improving gaming performance.
The previous generation of iPads, the iPad mini 2 and iPad Air, were at a performance disadvantage compared to the iPhone 5S. They shared the same A7 chip, but due to the need to power a drastically larger screen, their GPUs had less energy to put towards gaming. That meant games ran smoother or looked better on the phone than they did on the tablet.
The new iPad Air 2 rectifies that situation. The A8X GPU apparently offers twice the performance of the standard A8 GPU, likely due to increasing the core count from 4 to 6. Considering that the screen of the iPad has a little over 3 times the number of pixels as the iPhone 6, we should be looking at a new iPad that actually performs comparably to the iPhone from the same year – a situation we haven’t seen for several years.
It’s worth noting that we have a different story with the iPhone 6 Plus. The Plus powers twice as many pixels as the regular iPhone 6, but does not feature an upgraded GPU, meaning it performs almost half as well as the iPhone 6 and the iPad Air 2.
The iPad mini 3 – A Very Mini Upgrade
Then we come to the iPad mini 3, and the story changes pretty drastically. Simply put, it looks like the only thing new about the new mini is the gold paint job and the Touch ID sensor. The processor is last year’s A7 – not even a standard A8 chip, as I was expecting. Performance should be identical, though perhaps they managed to clock the chip a bit higher, as they did with last year’s iPad Air. If we’re lucky, they managed to upgrade the display from last year’s desaturated model to the true sRGB-accurate display on the iPad Air and iPad 4 line.
Apple didn’t even upgrade the Wifi in the iPad mini 3 to 802.11ac like they did with the new Air, meaning the iPad mini 3 still maxes out at 802.11n. This will eventually be noticeable for Airplay gaming quality when Apple finally releases an 802.11ac-capable Apple TV (I’m still a little sad today wasn’t the day for that).
To be fair, last year’s iPad mini 2 was a great product. It’s only major weaknesses – a little bit too heavy and a slightly desaturated screen – may very well have been solved with this year’s model. But it wasn’t a device that was particularly well suited for gaming. Sadly, it still isn’t.
Final Thoughts
There is still quite a bit unknown about these new iPads, much of which we’ll learn as they start getting into the hands of reviewers. Was the RAM upgraded? Is the screen on the iPad mini 3 still desaturated? Are there any other performance improvements in the A8X chip, maybe related to AirPlay encoding? We’ll see the answers to those questions soon, but for now, the conclusion is still pretty straightforward.
If you want to buy an iPad for gaming, you should buy the iPad Air 2. Period. It’s over two-and-a-half as powerful as any other iPad, including the new iPad mini 3.
There. If only Apple made all of our decisions that easy…