Two-minute review
The iPhone 13 mini is Apple’s smallest iPhone, despite it being a year old, and that's because Apple opted to ditch the mini for its iPhone 14 line. Instead, an iPhone 14 Plus was launched in its place, with a big display yet lower specs.
That makes the iPhone 13 mini the second and last member of Apple's small-body line, though it's not a huge upgrade over the iPhone 12 mini. Nearly all of the upgrades are inside the one-hand-friendly phone, so it doesn’t look much different to the previous device.
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Arguably the most welcome of the upgrades here is that, during our extensive testing, we found the iPhone 13 mini battery life to have improved significantly year-over-year. Rest assured, small phone users: you can now go all day using this phone, even if, unsurprisingly, the battery life isn’t as good as you’ll get from the larger iPhone 13 or iPhone 13 Pro Max.
You’ll spend less time charging this phone and more time snapping better photos, thanks to the improved camera sensors that are part of the iPhone 13 mini’s mostly familiar-looking dual-camera system. The main wide camera lets in 47% more light, according to Apple, and sure enough, all the night mode photos we shot looked bright, with markedly less noise than images captured on the iPhone 12 mini.
Photos look better partly thanks to the upgraded sensor, and Sensor-shift OIS technology that was previously exclusive to the iPhone 12 Pro and its Pro Max partner, and partly due to the advancements in computational photography.
There’s also good news if the iPhone 13 mini inspires you to take more photos: Apple has bumped up the storage tiers from 2020’s devices, so gone is the severely limiting 64GB entry-level size. Say hello to 128GB, 256GB and 512GB minis – but also, say hello to higher prices for the phones in most regions.
There are cosmetic upgrades you may miss at first blush. The screen notch is smaller, but most certainly hasn’t gone away (and on a smaller phone, it feels like it eats away at the screen real estate even more than on the iPhone 13 Pro Max). And the overall display brightness has been amped up, peaking at 800 nits for comfortable viewing when you're outdoors on a bright day and 1200 nits for HDR content.
The iPhone 13 mini will be the last small iPhone from Apple, for a while at least, due to underwhelming sales of the iPhone 12 mini. That’s a shame, because with this second-gen upgrade Apple fixed a lot of what turned us off from the iPhone 12 mini, and this small model could be the best iPhone for fans of compact devices.
iPhone 13 mini release date and price
The iPhone 13 mini was released on September 24, 2021, 10 days after its reveal. It came out alongside the rest of the iPhone 13 series, and you can buy it in the US, UK and Australia.
Outside of iPhone 13 mini deals, the phone normally retails for $699 / £679 / AU$1,199 with 128GB of storage and goes up from there.
The 256GB variant will cost you $799 / £779 / AU$1,369, while the 512GB model is priced at $999 / £979 / AU$1,719. There isn’t a 1TB model for the iPhone 13 mini, so you’ll want to look to the Pro editions to get more space.
This is the smallest iPhone in the 13 series and the cheapest, but it’s also more expensive than the iPhone 12 mini in most regions. That’s partly due to the increase in storage – the 12 mini started out with just 64GB of storage, though inflation plays a part, too.
At launch, the iPhone 12 mini cost $599 / £579 / AU$999 so it’s notably more expensive than the 2021 model.
