The new iPad Mini with retina display finally started trickling into stores yesterday, and as usual, the fine folks at iFixit have taken up their multifarious tools of gadget disassembly and seized upon the unsuspecting device. Here’s what this baby looks like under the hood.
There are slight design changes and tweaks under the hood, but maybe the most significant point of note is that the tablet’s A7 SoC is in fact the exact same part that’s in the iPhone 5s — compared to the slightly tweaked version in the iPad Air.
From the point-of-view of repairs, the good news is that some key, likely-to-fail (or break) components like the 2048 x 1536 LCD, front panel glass and battery are all easily replaced. Other parts like the often finicky lightning connector is straight up soldered to the logic board, which makes springing it loose all but impossible. [iFixit]