Question

The new iPad Mini has a 7.9 inch screen size. Does it have a retina display? Will it automatically scale existing xibs and storyboards or do we have to create two versions of each?

Do we deal with it similar to the way we deal with the iPhone 5?

How would I create a definition or a condition to see if the device is running iPad Mini?

Answer 1

If your app works on an iPad 1 or an iPad 2 it will work as-is on the new iPad mini. There is no retina display on the mini. From an app’s perspective it’s identical to the iPad 2.

Edit: It was asked how to determine when an app is running on an iPad mini. There is no API check for this. The screen size doesn’t help. UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() doesn’t help. Until someone actually has one, there is no way to know if the UIScreenMode pixelAspectRatio is any different (probably it’s the same as the iPad 2).

This leaves only one possibility – to get the machine from uname() and hardcode a check against this value. This is never a desired approach. And as of this writing, we don’t know what the value will be. Perhaps iPad5,x assuming the 4th gen iPad is iPad4,x.

Edit: So far I’ve seen a report that the iPad mini returns iPad2,5 (yes, that’s a two comma five) as well as iPad2,6 and iPad2,7 for the machine name.