Instapaper’s Marco Arment has put up a post on his blog discussing the arrival of two new iPads in his server logs. Generally speaking, the models that showed up marked iPad1,x in the logs were the first iPad, iPad2,x is the second, and iPad3,x the third — so where does the iPad Mini show up in this numbering scheme?
Arment’s logs show a surprising numberings scheme: iPad2,5 and iPad2,6. For those of you who don’t remember, the iPad2,1, iPad2,2, and iPad2,3 were the Wi-Fi, GSM, and CDMA models. The iPad2,4 was a quiet update to the Wi-Fi version with better battery life — so most likely the iPad2,5 and iPad2,6 are the new iPad Mini.
The implication is that the iPad Mini has something similar under the hood to the second generation iPad:
The much more likely explanation is that iPad2,5 and iPad2,6 are the new “iPad Mini” in Wi-Fi and GSM, and I haven’t recorded the likely iPad2,7 CDMA version yet.
If so, this suggests that the iPad Mini is, effectively, an iPad 2: an A5 with 512 MB of RAM and enough GPU power to drive the Gruber Display, but not a Retina Display.
So it could be the previous hardware, squeezed into a smaller, cheaper package. If this does hit the rumored $249 price point, that’s a hell of a deal for the same hardware that cost all but twice that just a year or so again.
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