iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 2 Earn a Spot on Apple’s Vintage Products List

BY Chandraveer Mathur

Published 3 May 2022

iPad Air 2 iPad Mini 2

After five years of being unavailable for purchase as new units, the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 2 have earned their place on Apple’s list of vintage and obsolete products. This means they will soon stop receiving service and repair at Apple Authorised Service Centers and Apple Stores.

The iPhone maker usually declares products “vintage” around five years after they are taken off the store shelves. Apple offers service and repair parts (subject to their availability) until seven years pass. Once they do, the devices are declared obsolete.

The iPad Air 2 made its debut in October 2014, earning its place in the history books as the first iPad to sport a Touch ID sensor for biometric authentication. It had a laminated gapless display on the front, making it thinner than the original iPad Air. It was powered by Apple’s A8X processor which enabled a decent tablet user experience for the time.

The other device now declared obsolete is the iPad Mini 2 which launched back in November 2013. It came to be known as the Retina iPad minmi because it was the first in the first mini model to sport a Retina display with a 2048×1536 pixel resolution. It was remarkably similar to the outgoing model but was heftier and thicker than it. The iPad mini 2 was powered by Apple’s A7 chip and M7 coprocessor shared with the iPhone 5s.

That said, Apple was expected to relinquish some of the MacBook Air models from 2013-14 to the same list of obsolescence.

[Via Apple Support]