The newly redesigned iPad Mini was one of the most thrilling announcements at Apple’s iPhone 13 launch on Tuesday, however, a flaw has emerged in the aftermath: According to reports, the new iPad Mini does not support mmWave 5G. There’s also a possibility that Apple’s new A15 Bionic chipset will be slower than the one found in the iPhone 13 range.
Support for 5G on the iPad Mini’s cellular edition was one of Apple’s biggest selling points, but according to Apple’s tech specs, it only supports low- and mid-band 5G, not mmWave. Apple originally tapped into the 5G hype machine with the iPhone 12, and the company continues to trumpet the technology’s higher download and upload speeds in 2021.
Coverage, which has grown in the United States but isn’t always quicker than LTE, is required to get rapid 5G speeds. Carriers such as Verizon and T-Mobile have major plans to boost 5G performance in 2021, including expanding the availability of fast mmWave, but in areas where coverage is restricted, it may not be worth the hassle just yet.
According to rumours, the processor’s performance is likewise lacking. According to GeekBench, the Mini’s performance is 2.9 GHz, which is a little slower than the 3.2 GHz reported by the outlet for the iPhone 13. GeekBench, on the other hand, isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to determining a device’s performance. There’s no way to know for sure if those figures are correct without holding an iPad Mini in your hands. As XDA Developers has demonstrated, faking a GeekBench result is not difficult.
If you want to see a real difference between the new Mini and the iPhones, look at their graphics performance. The iPad Mini has five graphics cores, one more than the 4-core GPU included in the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Mini. We won’t know for sure until we get a chance to test it, but the iPad Mini without mmWave could still be rather capable.
