Revealed: The amazing magical innovation in the iPad Mini 3 – a lick of paint

Teardown Ready to ditch your iPad Mini 2 for the latest and greatest miniature fondleslab from Apple? You may not get much more for your money.

Hardware teardown specialist iFixit has dismantled of the iPad Mini 3 and found that, underneath a pile of glue and some gold paint, it's more or less the same tablet as the iPad Mini 2.

iFixit has also torn down the iPad Air 2, the new Mac Mini and the 27" 5K iMac.

But, hey, it's gold now!

According to the website's report, the new slab from Chairman Honeycrisp has many of the same components as the last model with the addition of more flash storage and a Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

The teardown experts found that, overall, the new iPad's components remained largely the same and, on top of that, the tablet is not particularly friendly to do-it-yourself repairers. The firm gave the iPad Mini 3 a repairability score of 2/10, making the slab next to impossible to fix for most.

Many of the components, including the 64-bit Apple A7 ARM-compatible system-on-chip processor, and the 5Mp rear-facing camera, were the same we saw in last year's mini model, making the new slab an incremental upgrade at best. The torn-down tab also has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of Hynix NAND flash.

It does, however, also pack an NXP Semiconductors 65V10 NFC controller, but not an antenna for the wireless communications chip. So although this part is used in the iPhone 6 for pay-by-wave at shopping tills, it can't be used by the iPad Mini 3 for buy-by-bonk, well-placed sources familiar with matter told us.

Instead, we understand, the NXP chip includes the secure element for Apple Pay, allowing people to spend money in apps using their stored bank card details [see page 24 of this Apple security PDF].

iFixit also spotted copious amounts of glue used to keep the slab together: vital components including the Touch ID sensor in the home button were held in place with gobs of gunk. On top of that, the Touch ID sensor is affixed to the glass, making replacement of cracked screens that much more difficult.

"Removing the home button is now a much more difficult job," iFixit writes.

"If you want to keep Touch ID functionality after a screen replacement, you'll have to transfer the home button to the new front panel."

Good luck fixing that on your own

Other components glued in place included the front and back camera and the ribbon cables holding various components in place.

On the plus side, the iPad Mini 3 doesn't solder the battery into the case. So you've got that going for you, which is nice.

iPad, deconstructed

To be fair, tablets in general don't receive particularly high scores for repairability. iFixit has issued similarly crappy scores for the Microsoft Surface Pro and other fondleslabs. Apple devices in general are tough for outsiders to repair. ®