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In this article, I give you my Apple iPad Mini 5 (2019) review with specs included. Finally, after three and a half years Apple released the iPad Mini 4 replacement. I didn’t think it was gonna happen anymore. But this is how Apple rolls sometimes, they take forever to update popular products.

This is the iPad Mini, the fifth-generation iPad Mini. I’m super excited actually about this because this is a tablet that does so many things and doesn’t try to do things that you probably didn’t want anyway and don’t want to pay for. Of course, that’s gonna be up to you.

So, it looks almost identical to the iPad Mini 4 and you might be totally bummed about that you might be ok with that. I’m actually ok with it. What does that mean?

Well, it still has a bezel particularly at the top and the bottom. You know it gives you a place to hold on to the tablet having used iPad pros with they’ve barely their vessels believe me they can be annoying sometimes it was something this small you want to play games you’re doing driving games like this you know you don’t want to have a whoopsy with it.

If it does bother you though get the black-faced option so if you get the space great you’ll have the blackface on it a lot less obvious than if you got the white which comes with the silver and the gold option so you’ve got three colors total.

The price is about the same as it’s always been, $399 starting price and that gets you a 64 GB Wi-Fi only model. It’s a $529 starting price if you want it with Cellular and this has both at Eastham embedded SIM and a nano-SIM card slot so you’ve got both there.

The one thing that really annoys me is 64 gigs of storage is ok a lot of us make do with that but I think 128 gigs would have been the sweet spot but there is no 128 gig model.

You can spend a whole lot of money more honest $150 to go up to 256 GB of storage which is a lot more storage but probably more money maybe for an iPad Mini and more storage for an iPad Mini than you were looking for this is what it is.

The good news is we have an Apple A12 Bionic CPU, which’s the same CPU that is in the iPhone 10s and 10’s Macs for example. It’s not the A12 X that’s in the pro models which is even super faster but honestly for a mini and given the fact that iOS runs ready fluidly it’s well optimized for the CPU that’s fine with me.

You have a touch ID here, you don’t have a face ID. I do like face ID what would like to have had it here but I can live with touch ID. You’ll notice the difference of your going between a current-generation iPhone and this and suddenly it’s asking you to touch the fingerprint sensor where before you didn’t even know it was just using face IDs sometimes for like website logins that sort of thing.

It has a laminated display, unlike the even less expensive $329 basic iPad model that Apple introduced in 2018, and to me that does make a big difference it makes it feel premium.

The reflectivity is a lot less, the colors are very rich, it’s got great contrast as 500 nits of brightness it’s a very nice-looking display with the same resolution that Apple has been using for just about forever and the same four by three aspect ratio which is great for webpages it’s great for your email it’s wonderful for ebooks it’s not super great for video though.

Most of those things are you know the usual widescreen aspect ratio. You can have black bars on top and bottom when you’re watching a video.

One thing about the display, it’s the usual 60 Hertz refresh rate it’s not the pro motion 120 Hertz refresh display. Given the size of the display, it’s a lot harder to see any kind of motion trails anyway. Promotion didn’t ever excite me a whole lot anyway, and one of the things that I do use an iPad for a lot is for art.

I spend a lot of time with the iPad pro drawing and I do notice that’s about the only time that I really notice the difference. Sometimes strokes don’t seem to follow the pencil quite as fast but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Speaking of the pencil, yes it uses the Apple pencil 1. This is what I’ve had models and really I spent hours and hours every week drawing on an iPad and I’m not really bothered by the fact that it doesn’t use Apple pencil 2.

Yes, you do stick the pencil in the tablets, but it looks like it has a tail to charge it. It does not have a flat side it has a slippery surface that’s what wraps are for I mean this is not a placement for slick wraps but for ten bucks you can get a pencil wrap it’s not slippery anymore.

The drawing quality, the line quality, the tilt, the shading, they’re all there it’s just every bit as good and this is like the perfect pocket sketchbook this so that you see artists carrying around to do sketching in the field or to pass time. It’s just been really wonderful for that and the upside is is that you’re not dragging your hand across the glass as much because this is a smaller screen.

There is much of a problem every with palm rejection on iPads but the smearing is there the occasional palm rejection not going to happen here. It’s just delightful to use for art. And likewise, for note-taking, it’s also about the size of a notepad that you might carry around well here’s your digital notepad it’s superb for them.

The original Apple pencil is still $99, it’s still expensive. You can get the Logitech crayon that’s 70 bucks and it looks kind of well like a crayon. It was designed really for K through 12 kids more than for adults but you can get it for $30 less I would just go with the regular Apple pencil.

The Logitech crayon does not support pressure levels which is part of the beauty of the naturalness of the feeling of writing and drawing on an iPad. Tt does support tilt though.

One of the delightful things about the retro design is you have a headphone jack. And this will uses the Lightning connector it doesn’t have the USBC of the pro models which is probably making life easier for a lot of people who have iPhones and other iPads you can interchange the charger as the cables all that sort of thing.

It comes with the usual 12 watt USB charger and the cable in the box.

The top of those 3 GB are RAM in Apple’s world that’s not bad. iPhones have four gigs of RAM but the cheapest iPad only has two gigs I would always like to see more RAM and Apple products clearly they don’t care what I think about that but it’s certainly adequate it gets the job done multitasking is fluid and yes you can do split-screen multitasking on this yes at 7.9 inches that’s maybe of limited use but you can do it.

All the multitasking gestures, the swipe up to bring up the dock, the swipe down to bring your controls up, all that stops here that you have on larger iPads and it works perfectly well.

Touch ID on this is touch ID generation 2 I don’t think they make generation 1 sensors anymore do they I don’t know. It works perfectly fine by default it’s set to actually make you click the physical home button this is a moving, not a haptic button and you can change if you want to just rest your finger on the button without actually clicking it.

Forget the Smart Covers that Apple sells for every time you open and close it via the magnet it will turn on anyway by itself.

It has Apple Pay as you might guess no NFC. Yes, it’s small but it’s not iPhone small. I don’t think they think you’re going to be taking your iPad Mini out and putting it against the point-of-sale system.

So the rear camera, well the good news is it doesn’t have a bump. So it looks nice and smooth it’s not going to scratch your table the bad news is that eight-megapixel is f 2.4 and this is not a cutting-edge camera it’s adequate that’s about all there is. It records 1080p video not 4k video it does slow motion it does panorama and has HDR it’s an ok camera, not a great camera.

And you have a seven-megapixel front face-time camera as well for your FaceTime chat Skype whatever it is you want to do with that.

For conductivity it’s the same as always dual-band Wi-Fi a turtle have an AC and if you get the cellular model its 4G LTE and it’s Gigabit LT so that’s faster that’s been upgraded.

GPS only comes with a cellular model that’s standard for Apple.

The iPad Mini, does it still need to exist? I guess Apple must think so I mean obviously they have a lot of folks in the restaurant industry who use these things these days and other vertical markets but I think a lot of people still enjoy having a tablet that is still pretty portable.

I have an iPad Pro 12 point 9 inch I love it for drawing big screen all that sort of thing. I do not take it anywhere it’s just as big as taking a laptop around its delicate glass you get the idea. This is way easier to take anywhere with you.

I kind of feel like I’m going back to the roots of tablets. It’s obviously not trying to be something that it isn’t. It is a tablet it’s for media consumption it’s for reading is for note-taking it’s for you can do GarageBand all those kinds of things.

The core iPad functionality it’s not trying to be one of those look it can be your laptop and you can attach a keyboard to it. You could use an external Bluetooth keyboard with it obviously it’s physically too small for keyboard cases and really to be practical I mean teeny teeny teeny little keys you would have there.

For those who are looking for something that’s going to replace your laptop, obviously, this isn’t it. But, you’re just looking for a portable do anything very fast tablet that’s going to get OS upgrades for years to come this Apple is very good about supporting that with a great tablet ecosystem of out there they can play the latest games now I mean the poor old three and a half-year-old iPad many four was not great for gaming anymore and this one can do Fortnite, it can do any of the racing games that you’d like it’s it’s all good there.

I mean there’s a place for this it’s basically the ultimate kid and adult babysitter right these days we’re all into information overload we’re always wanting to look at our screen this is something let’s face it you take it into the bathroom probably don’t you? You can take it anywhere very easily right. And for kids obviously, it’s a great way for them to stay entertain play games draw all that sort of stuff yeah.

I’m totally thrilled that they kept this kind of in the mid-range with a nice display the fast CPU and all this stuff without going to those pro-level features. One thing I do kind of wish it had is the quad speakers of four speakers that you do get on the pro models.

This has stereo speakers but the fact that they both are firing from the same side means you don’t get any stereo separation. They’re good sounding speakers for a small tablet but yeah no stereo separation.

So that’s the iPad Mini 5 kind of the Goldilocks principle in action just like the new iPad Air 3rd generation that Apple announced. It’s not super low-end, you get the latest CPU on it you get a laminated high-resolution display, all the things that really camping and not going crazy into pro territory. That keeps the price where the mini has always been at a $399 starting price.

It’s a very versatile little tablet I’m really fond of this size even despite the fact that I own an iPhone 10s Mac’s because this screen still is a lot bigger and the aspect ratio is a lot more versatile for pretty much everything other than video consumption is a fantastic ebook reader it’s a fantastic pocket sketchbook and note-taking device. It’s great for Twitter it’s great for your email all that sort of thing. It does all I wanted it to do, just make a new one.