Apple Starts Shipping iPad Mini With Retina Display Today
Apple said today that shipping of the iPad mini with the Retina display is getting under way. Announced on Oct. 22 without a specific launch date, an Apple internal support site started giving the ship date yesterday.
Similar in design to the first iPad mini, which debuted last fall, the new version of the device has several major improvements, chief among them the Retina display, which boasts 323 pixels per square inch, matching that of the flagship iPad Air.
The refreshed iPad mini also contains Apple’s new 64-bit A7 processor, the latest and greatest of the Apple-designed but Samsung-built chip, which Apple has touted as “desktop class,” implying that it’s a sufficiently beefy computing engine to power a full-fledged personal computer. Its computing capacity is four times that of its predecessor, while its ability to handle graphics has improved by a factor of eight.
It sells for a starting price of $399 for a 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi-only version and goes up to $829 for a 128GB version that includes LTE wireless capability.
The device is going on sale today in the U.S., Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore, with other countries to follow.
Apple shares fell slightly in premarket trading, to $518.10. The shares have declined by more than two percent this year.