Question

Detecting different hardware at runtime is useful for analytics (among other, even more questionable purposes).

Many iOS app creators may be interested to know how many users are experiencing their app on an iPad mini (rather than just knowing how many users are experiencing their app on an iPad with 1024×768 screen resolution – which would also be interesting).

Is there any public API in Cocoa touch/UIKit/ObjC/C which could be used to detect that your iOS app is running on an iPad mini at runtime? Ideally, this method should distinguish between iPad 2 & iPad mini (which have the same number of pixels, but a different pixel density).

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Post Script: I realize many people will consider detecting iPad mini at runtime a bad idea. However, I think this is a valid question with a definite Yes or No answer. An answer which I think it is useful for the community to know.

Answer 1

Boxel’s answer would be good if it didn’t invoke undefined behavior and if it didn’t have superfluous parts. One, + [NSString stringWithCString:encoding:] requires a C string – that is, a NUL-terminated char pointer (else it will most likely dump core). Also, you don’t need the conversion to NSString – since sysctlbyname() provides you with a plain old C string (without the NUL terminator, of course), you can directly use strcmp() to save a few dozen CPU cycles:

#include <sys/sysctl.h>

size_t size;
sysctlbyname("hw.machine", NULL, &size, NULL, 0);
char *machine = malloc(size + 1);
sysctlbyname("hw.machine", machine, &size, NULL, 0);
machine[size] = 0;

if (strcmp(machine, "iPad2,5") == 0) {
    /* iPad mini */
}

free(machine);

Edit: now that answer is fixed as well.