Poll: are you buying Retina iPad mini?

iPad mini 2 (Retina, Personal Pickup)

Apple’s iPad mini with Retina display is finally here and available via online orders, with shipping or pickup at the company’s brick-and-mortar outlets. In fact, the new iPads are already being featured prominently on the online Apple Store.

Wasting no time whatsoever, Apple’s web store is now pitching both new iPads as perfect holiday gifts, even with the initially severely constrained supplies of Retina iPad minis.

With that in mind, today I want to focus on a Retina successor to Apple’s best-selling tablet, the iPad mini. Do you think you’ll be getting an iPad mini with Retina display this coming holidays? The poll is right past the fold so cast your vote and meet us in comments. Should be fun!

As you know, the iPad Air and Retina iPad mini are essentially identical specs-wise, sans the latter’s smaller form factor and a marginally slower A7 chip clocked at 1.29GHz versus 1.39GHz for the iPad Air and 1.3GHz for the iPhone 5s.

While the slight difference in clock frequencies is negligible, those coming from the original iPad are bound to experience a fivefold jump in performance, courtesy of the Apple-designed 64-bit A7 silicon.

Anyways, cast your vote now.


The iPad mini with Retina display is initially available the United States, Australia, China, Hong Kong (Wi-Fi model only), Japan, New Zealand and Singapore, with other countries to follow in the coming weeks. The gizmo comes in silver and space grey, in Wi-Fi-only or Wi-Fi + Cellular variants and four storage tiers each.

The 16/32/64/128GB Wi-Fi models are $399/$499/$599/$699 (a $130 extra to go cellular). Apple is also selling last year’s original iPad mini, now discounted from $329 down to $299 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model ($429 for its cellular counterpart).

Christmas 2013 (iPad Air, iPad mini Retina 001)

Needless to say, Tim Cook & Co. will happily sell you one of the $39 polyurethane Smart Covers, available for both the original and Retina iPad mini in blue, green, pink, yellow, black and (RED). If you’re more of an aniline-dyed leather type of guy, the price goes up to $69 and finishes change to yellow, beige, blue, brown, black and (RED).

If it means anything to you, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple called the Retina iPad mini a no-compromise device, writing in his quick review that “there’s nothing bad to say about the Retina iPad mini”. Surely it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Apple’s smaller iPad, for the time being, is going to remain its best-selling iPad model.

You may want to check out our related poll that tested respondents’ preference toward the iPad Air. And while we’re at it, how about taking a look at some of the amusing and interesting polls in iDB’s archive?

So, what did you vote in the poll?

Hopefully, you won’t mind sharing your thought process with fellow readers in comments.