I was beginning to do the preparation for a new smartphone review and decided to look back at some old ones. I saw my review for the iPhone 13 mini and had to stop myself from editing it. Journalistic integrity and whatnot. But it hit me, I really should re-review the iPhone 13 mini. So I took a look at the review and found the items I wanted to change. It’s not much, mostly I was on the money, but, let’s face it, two years later and with the rose-colored glasses off my eyes, I can be more objective in my criticism.
When the iPhone 13 mini came out, we knew it was likely Apple’s last mini iPhone. While details emerged about the iPhone 14, it became obvious that there would be no iPhone 13 mini. It can be hard knowing you’re reviewing what may be the last iPhone to actually fit in an average-sized human hand. The last sensible iPhone. The iPhone, for years, was smaller than the Android competition specifically because large phones are cumbersome and annoying to use. They made whole commercials about how you could use the whole screen on the iPhone 5, unlike the ridiculously huge 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Phablets (you read that right). However, big sells, and, as screen sizes grew, so did profit margins, as companies found they could charge over $1,000 for a new phone, as long as it had a big shiny screen. Now, two years later, the battle over and lost, it’s time to look at the iPhone 13 mini, Apple’s last great iPhone.
In This Article:
Specs
- Width: 64.2mm
- Height: 131.5mm
- Depth: 7.65mm
- Weight: 141g
- Processor: A15
- Battery: 2438 mAh (reported via GSM Arena), Apple: “17 hours video playback.”
- Rear Cameras:
- Primary: 12MP, ƒ/1.6 aperture (1x zoom)
- Wide Angle: 12MP, ƒ/2.4 aperture (.5x zoom)
- Front Camera:
- Screen:5.4-inch, 476ppi P3 display with 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio and 1,200 nits peak brightness
Design 7/10
This was something I really wanted to change about my first review. I gave it a 10/10 and I remember why: for all its flaws, it’s still the only 5.4-inch iPhone. It’s still the only one that deserves a 10/10. It’s the best iPhone design you can get. If an iPhone is the best phone design you can get, this is the best iPhone. But the iPhone isn’t the best phone design you can get. Just because it’s the best-designed iPhone doesn’t mean Apple gets a pass on their sloppy designs. Apple has been sloppy and lazy with their designs for years, and it’s time tech reviewers start calling them out on it. The iPhone could be so much more, and Apple’s content with making the same fragile, flawed devices year after year because we’ll buy them, because what are we going to do, switch to Android? Ha!
The best thing the iPhone 13 mini has going for it is its size. If not for the size and those flat aluminum sides, this wouldn’t have a respectable score. The glass on the back is glossy and attracts fingerprints. Apple knew they were making it worse, because they made the “pro” models with a matte texture. They knew they were making the design worse in this phone to try to upsell people to the pro models and they did it anyway. Intentionally making one device worse to sell another? That’s just bad design, period.
Then there’s that damn camera bump. The camera bump is half its thickness. Seriously. They phone may only be 7.65mm thick, but that’s if you don’t include the camera warts. Those bring the device up to 10.5mm. Nearly 3 extra millimeters on a device that’s less than 8mm thick is a huge difference. The device can’t sit flat anywhere except face down (get a good screen protector, I guess?). It rocks around. Maybe that was necessary for the camera quality, but just the same camera on the corner of the device? At least Google got creative with their camera bump. Spreading it out across the top was a brilliant design. Apple could also reduce the camera bump and give the people the one thing they keep asking for when it comes to the iPhone: a larger battery. Make it thicker, shrink the bump, give us some all-day battery life.
Then there’s the notch. Apple shrunk the notch’s width from the iPhone 12 to the iPhone 13, but they made it so tall it peeks into your content now. At least before we could watch a video in its native widescreen format and forget the notch is even there. Now it’s visible on every widescreen video because Apple made it too large. Did they think we wouldn’t notice that their “smaller” notch actually took up more space?
The size of the iPhone buys it a lot of grace, especially with the nice flat sides of the phone offering grip. The rest of the design is lazy carried-over junk from previous iPhone models. Camera in the corner, glass on a frame. Fragile as can be. Apple’s not even hiding the fact that, while the iPhone 12 was a “revolutionary” design, it was just copying the iPhone 4 that came before it. It was reverting back to a previous, better design. Now, the iPhone 15 still looks like an iPhone 12. Eventually the camera bump will be so large on these things that it’ll function as its own tripod, and Apple will still insist on designing the thing the same way every year. Fragile glass, huge corner camera, poor battery life, fingerprint magnet you cover with an ugly piece of TPU to make up for the design flaws. Maybe I’m just bitter, as Android continually comes out with more creative and fun designs, and Apple’s still rehashing old designs that haven’t been revolutionary in a decade.
Battery Life 6/10
Between the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 13, Apple increased the thickness of the iPhone. This was to improve the battery life on their devices beyond what their meager processor upgrade could. They didn’t go far enough. Many cases that worked for the iPhone 12 would still work for the iPhone 13. It just wasn’t a large enough change. Considering Apple nearly doubled the size of the camera bump, they could have at least gave us a little more battery to match.
I was going to get a battery swap for my iPhone 13 mini because, after 2 years, it really needed it. Still, I got a deal on a brand new iPhone 13 mini, and decided to take it instead. The iPhone 13 mini had passable all day battery life on day one. However, a year down the road it started to show its age. By the second year, it wasn’t an all-day iPhone anymore. Craving thinness, Apple refused to just make the iPhone last a little longer, and it’s starting to get really hard to see why. The iPhone 13 mini is already struggling because of its smaller battery size, which the smaller screen doesn’t make up for enough. So why not make it just a little thicker and make a phone that can last another year?
Maybe that’s the problem: it could last too long for Apple to get away with selling you one of these things every 2 years. Too bad the slow churn of monopolistic capitalism means each device has been a snoozefest, leading to slow sales anyway.
Screen 7/10
The screen on the iPhone 13 mini is sharp. In fact, it’s sharper than the larger iPhones, with more pixels crammed into a smaller area. The resolution bump is a small one, you’d likely never notice it. Colors are vibrant and accurate. In fact, when I compare the screens of other devices, it’s often to the excellent sharpness, color accuracy, and clarity of the iPhone screen. It’s truly a wonderful screen… until something moves.
The iPhone 13 mini, frustratingly, still has only a 60fps screen. And this isn’t something that’s only true of these two-year-old iPhones. The iPhone 15 has the exact same limitation. Apple’s really getting away with releasing the same iPhone year after year. You don’t notice it until you use a different device that has a faster refresh rate. Then you realize things don’t have to become a blurry mess when you scroll. You realize how much faster and smoother items on your screen could move. I have a Motorola Razr Plus, with a 165fps refresh rate on both of its screens. I can scroll through my apps as fast as I can flick and read every single app name because it doesn’t become a blurry mess as I scroll. It’s so much better than what Apple’s still putting out on their “flagship” iPhones. And let’s not forget: even mid-range Android phones have faster refresh rates than Apple’s new iPhone 15. It’s hard not to criticize them for this.
Cameras 8/10
I may have been a bit harsh with the first time I reviewed the iPhone 13 mini camera. Yes, Apple has placed completely arbitrary restraints on it. This should have gotten Apple’s ultra-wide camera capable of doing macro shots, if not more useful telephoto lens instead. Apple could easily have integrated Apple ProRAW as well, but locked it to the Pro model just to upsell customers. Apple crippled the capabilities of this camera just to try to force people to buy the more expensive iPhone. Every year they just make the “leser” iPhone worse to upsell on the “Pro” model. The only problem? Apple didn’t make an iPhone 13 Pro mini, so if you want an iPhone that fits in your hand, you couldn’t get the camera features Apple locked away. Apple doomed the mini by ensuring only people willing to sacrifice “Pro” features for comfortable usability would buy it.
However, I have used this camera in low light settings. Astrophotography, late night photos, concerts, even photos in perfect lighting for reviews. I am testing a new Android phone that may not have the best camera among Android phones, but it’s also drastically behind the two-year-old iPhone 13 mini camera. It’s so obvious that the iPhone 13 mini camera is leaps and bounds ahead of all but the best new Android phone cameras. This camera is still a beast. Is it as good as the iPhone 15 Pro camera? The Google Pixel 8 Pro camera? Probably not. But it’s still an incredibly impressive cell phone camera 2 years after it was introduced, even with all of Apple’s lousy artificial limitations.
Performance 9.5/10
Apple barely improved the performance of the iPhone over the years. Every year is a minuscule improvement, with the iPhone 15 Pro being perhaps the first large leap in many years. The performance of a brand new iPhone 13 mini beats out iPhone 14 averages in some benchmarks still. It’s incredible how the performance has held up. Everything is still fast and snappy, and likely will be for quite some time. That’s one benefit to Apple’s performance improving so slowly, it’s already so far ahead of the competition, they still feel blazing fast years later. The iPhone 13 mini performance could easily carry it for a few more years, it’s truly future-proofed, as long as Apple continues to give it software updates.
Other Stuff
My keyboard uses USB-C. My iPad Air? USB-C. iPad mini? USB-C. Pixel 5a? USB-C. Moto razr+? USB-C. MacBook Pro? USB-C.
USB-C everywhere… but my primary phone.
I carry around a small USB-C to Lightning adapter on my keychain because it sometimes comes in handy. Charging your device shouldn’t be a pain in the ass. But here I am, struggling to find a reason for Apple still using Lightning on their devices in 2021. Now I’m stuck with this slow standard for a few more years. What’s worse is that iPhone 15 users are too. Only the iPhone 15 Pro has a faster USB 3 speed connection. Lightning was a USB 2 standard, and it’s slow with both charging and data transfers as a result. Lightning is awful. It was unacceptable from the moment USB-C started making its way into devices. By 2016, Apple should have begun transferring everything over to USB-C. Now, in 2023, they’re still struggling to do this and won’t complete the transition to 2024, at the earliest, a decade after USB-C was introduced. Ten years to do what most Android manufacturers did in less than two.
One charging method Apple didn’t mess up is MagSafe. That’s likely why the next version of Qi charging will also carry with it MagSafe-like charging alignment. A ring of magnets will soon surround all wireless chargers. Apple nailed it with MagSafe, and I’m glad to see it’ll eventually spread throughout the market.
Overall 8.5/10
The phone so nice, I bought it twice. What can I say bad about the iPhone 13 mini if, at the end of the day, I decided to buy a second one to last me, hopefully, four years of the iPhone 13 mini. That is, unless Apple reveals a folding iPhone 16 or an iPhone 16 mini next year. Then all bets are off. This is a fantastic little phone. It’s the perfect size. Just large enough for content consumption, like watching movies or videos on social networks, while also being a great size for gaming, especially with a controller. It adds less weight to a clip-on controller attachment, making it great for on-the-go play. Toss in the fact that I can use it one handed on a crowded train, and it’s a winner, for sure. It’s still my favorite iPhone ever, despite that ridiculous camera bump and slightly lower than desired battery life. It’s not the perfect iPhone, but it is the only one that’s the perfect size, and so, it’s what I’m sticking with. Despite Apple’s efforts to sabotage it, it still ended up a fantastic device.