The Once and Future iPad mini

2012 was a weird time for iPad fans. That spring, the 3rd-generation iPad debuted with a Retina display. It was slightly heavier and thicker than the iPad 2 before it, but it looked the screen looked amazing. Sadly, the performance of the A5X wasn’t always up to the job of pushing all those pixels, so Apple revised the full-sized iPad again in the fall. The 4th-gen iPad shipped just seven months later. It kept the same heavier and thicker design, but the A6X inside was “up to twice the CPU performance and up to twice the graphics performance of the A5X chip,” and it showed. It smoothed out all the little hiccups its predecessor would show, other than those in the then-new Apple Maps.1 The most exciting iPad news of 2012 wasn’t any of that. It was this little guy: A New Era The iPad mini was introduced at the same time as the 4th-gen iPad and totally stole the show. Here’s how Phil Schiller announced it on stage at the California Theatre in San Jose, standing in front of a video of an…