iPad iOS 7 on original iPad Mini

dhokes said:

I'm considering an iPad Mini and in a dilemma as to whether to get a second-hand iPad Mini with the A5 chip or wait for the new retina version with the A7 chip.

I plan to use it for typical low-end tasks e.g. browse safari, email, calendar, read .pdfs, Pocket, Dropbox...

How does the original iPad mini cope with iOS7?

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It works fine.

A brand new iPad mini for just $100 more would be recommended as it's not running on 2 and a half year old hardware.

Not good. It stutters and lags on the iPad 2 (which has the exact same specs as iPad mini) - even though the fancy graphics effects are disabled. Adding the blur rendering etc. you might be able to imagine how difficult THAT will be to render. The A5 chip is not really good for this purpose - wait for the iPad mini with Retina display.

I played with one at the Apple store and other than the limited RAM it looks plenty smooth to me. The RAM means you can only have 4-5 tabs open in Safai at a time before they start refreshing. Worst case scenario I can return it and get the new one but I don't think I'll need to do that.

My refurbished one gets here Tuesday

No lag problems at all with my iPad mini on iOS 7.0.3 Very happy with the performance with reduced motion set to off in the settings.

Wasn't too happy with it on the initial release of iOS 7 but now with the bug fixes applied it is very smooth indeed

MinEderPlayz said:

Not good. It stutters and lags on the iPad 2 (which has the exact same specs as iPad mini) - even though the fancy graphics effects are disabled. Adding the blur rendering etc. you might be able to imagine how difficult THAT will be to render. The A5 chip is not really good for this purpose - wait for the iPad mini with Retina display.

Click to expand...

I think something is up with yours, buddy. My mini runs fine with iOS7 and I think it will be just fine for a few years yet.

Alex

It works fine. I run the most power hungry apps on mine with no problem.

I bet it will be quite slow on iOS 8 (released this time next year). Usually on the third iOS iteration it is pretty sluggish. The mini is basically ios 5 hardware now on its third iOS (5,6,7) so I would avoid upgrading it past iOS 7. In fact, I'm keeping mine on 7.0.3 for as long as I can.

Runs just fine both on my IPad 2 and IPad Mini .

iOS 7.0.3 is fine on the mini with reduced motion set to on.

(I upgraded from 7.0.2 to 7.0.3 then done a DFU restore)

My Mini seemed a bit funky with iOS 7.0.1, but 7.0.3 runs just dandy. I have the reduce motion turned on (weird feature), and battery life is just as good as iOS 6. I thought I was getting a bit of a strange shadow thing going on when pinching out of an app, but that was just the translucent icon tray on the bottom allowing colors/shapes to show through. It's designed that way, so everything is normal.