The iPad At 7: A Visual History
The iPad is seven years old. Here are the tablets that defined a whole market.
iPad Mini
The iPad 4 was released alongside the iPad Mini. Whereas all previous Apple tablets were 9.7-inch, the iPad Mini was a smaller 7.9 inches.
It was a reaction to the popularity of the cheap, 7 inch slabs of the time, such as the Google Nexus 7, but Apple didn’t believe anything smaller could offer a satisfying tablet experience.
It was based on the iPad 2 specifications and has to date spawned three successors. Nonetheless, the 16GB base model was offered until 2015.
iPad Air & Air 2
The iPad Air was released in 2013 and like the name (much better than the previous naming system) suggests, it was lighter and thinner. It arrived as a flagship for iOS 7, the most radical redesign of the platform at the time, and was the biggest design shift since the iPad 2 two years earlier.
Other enhancements included a more powerful camera and the A7 and M7 processors from Apple.
Quiz: What do you know about the iPad?
A year later, the iPad Air 2 was released, boasting Apple Pay NFC features and shipped with iOS 8, which had a number of cross platform features. It was enhanced further with iOS 9, which added numerous multitasking capabilities.
iPad Mini 2 & 3
The first major revision of the iPad Mini saw the addition of the Retina display and faster A7 chip. Its specifications were close to the iPad Air and shares many components with the iPhone 5S. The iPad Mini 3 was largely the same both internally and externally but had the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.
