With an October 28 iPad mini launch in the rumor mill, Max Tech asks whether anyone who owns an iPhone Duo still needs a small tablet, and after setting the fold beside the iPad mini 7, the channel says no. Opened, the Duo nearly matches the mini's screen, while the mini's thick bezels make it the older-looking of the two.

Where the Duo pulls ahead

  • The screen. It's OLED at 120Hz against a 60Hz LCD, and up to 1,600 nits for HDR video against 500, per the channel. With the screens off, the mini is a mirror and the Duo's nano-texture coating isn't.
  • Speed. Geekbench 7 has the A20 Pro at almost 4,000 single-core and about 11,000 multi-core, against 2,691 and 7,188 for the mini, gaps of 48 and 53 percent in the video's math.
  • Graphics. 3DMark Steel Nomad Light averaged 23.9 frames per second on the Duo and 10.2 on the mini. The test game glitched in its menus on the mini and ran clean on the Duo, black bars and all, since it isn't optimized for the fold at launch.
  • Cameras. The under-display selfie camera roughly ties the mini's front camera. Flip the phone and the 48MP rear main or ultra wide takes the selfie instead, and a close-up of a dime shows detail the mini's rear camera smears into noise.
  • Touch ID. It sits in the side button under the thumb, where the mini puts it on the top edge.

Where the mini holds on

  • Speakers. The mini's sound has clearer vocals and more bass, from a body that isn't much thicker but has room for bigger enclosures.
  • Multitasking. The mini runs Stage Manager with freely resizable windows, while the Duo gets one fixed side-by-side layout.
  • Black levels. The glossy LCD shows deeper blacks than the Duo's matte OLED, whose coating lifts contrast in dark scenes.
  • Apple Pencil Pro. It snaps to the mini's side and charges there. The Duo works with the USB-C Apple Pencil on iOS 27.2, paired over a cable, and the nano-texture gives drawing a paper-like drag.

The argument Max Tech leans on hardest is about where each device spends its day, and the channel puts it plainly near the end.

it's an iPad that you have with you all the time

I'd weigh the split view more than the video does. An iPhoner who keeps notes open beside a PDF on the mini gets nothing like Stage Manager on the fold, and that's the one loss the Duo's speed can't buy back.