rumors of supply shortages and display
issues made us wonder if the iPad Mini
with Retina display was indeed going to
make it to our teardown table this month
but the buzz around the cryptic release
date of sometime in November started
again last night and of course we made
sure to get our hands on the iPad Mini
first thing so grab your eye openers and
let's jump right in
hi I'm Gwendolyn with iFixit and today
we're tearing down the brand new iPad
Mini with Retina display the new iPad
Mini with Retina display measures in at
200 millimeters by one hundred and
thirty four point seven millimeters the
new Retina display required a little
extra room as this version is just to
hit bigger than last year's model
measuring in at 7.5 millimeters which is
point three millimeters thicker it's
also a bit heavier than last year's
model weighing in at 331 grams up from
312 with our eye openers at the ready
and hot off the microwave we get to work
on opening this adorable little iPad and
of course gave us some resistance but
after a little pick action we're able to
get the front glass off revealing the
display that is held in place by a few
screws and just like that we remove the
display speaking of the display this guy
is one of the major upgrades in the iPad
Mini this 7.9 inch display has a
resolution of 2048 by 1536 and a pixel
density of 326 pixels per inch up from
1024 by 768 at 163 pixels per inch from
last year once we made it past the
mighty LCD shield plate we got our first
look inside the iPad Mini which means we
see a lot of battery with a lot of
adhesive so we pulled out the one-two
punch of our eye opener and our scraping
cards and got to work having to pry glue
down batteries always requires a great
deal of patience and care but we did
this just last week with the iPad air so
it didn't take us long to get this one
out this is a six thousand four hundred
seventy-one milliamp hour 3.75 full 24.3
watt hour lithium polymer battery which
is quite a bump from the battery in the
first iPad Mini but all those additional
pixels have to get their juice from
somewhere the logic board had a nice
surprise for us no adhesive Apple
cleverly fit the logic board over a
couple screwpost making replacing it
much easier than its Big Brother
iPad air on the board we saw some
familiar sights the a7 processor is the
same one found in the iPhone 5s and
according to recent Geekbench scores is
clocked at 1.3 gigahertz just a bit
slower than the iPad air the m7
coprocessor that we saw in the iPad air
and iPhone 5s is also present on this
version of the mini processing all that
data from the sensors on your tablet and
saving a lot of power and what's this
there's a hole in my logic board this
may be a weight saving solution from
Apple most likely this will not be in
the cellular versions of the mini but
we'll just have to wait and see we've
come to the end of our teardown which
means it's time to talk repair a
building and I fixed it it's our mission
to teach people how to repair everything
so we give every gadget we tear down a
repair ability score between 1 and 10 10
being the easiest to repair and one
being the most difficult the iPad Mini
with Retina displays for day two out of
10 and here's why on the upside the LCD
and glass are not fused together and can
be replaced independently and the
battery is not soldered to the logic
board or other components but on the
downside copious amounts of adhesive
hold many components in place making
repair extremely difficult the Lightning
connector is soldered to the logic board
and hidden screws mean you'll need to be
very diligent when trying to remove
internal components for the complete
teardown including tons of beautiful
high-quality images head on over to
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