The Xiaomi Pad 9 beat the iPad 11 in our review on the screen, GPU speed and battery life. The screen is where Apple looks weakest.
Display: 144 Hz and laminated vs 60 Hz and not
The Pad 9 has an 11.2-inch LCD with 3,200 x 2,136 pixels and a 144 Hz refresh rate. The iPad 11 is stuck at 60 Hz, and its panel isn’t laminated. There’s a small air gap between the glass and the LCD, which makes contrast look flatter and puts the stylus tip a little too far from the line it draws. For a tablet people use mainly to read, scroll and take notes, that’s a strange place to cut corners.
The refresh rate matters in daily use. Scrolling is smoother on the Pad 9, and if your phone runs at 120 Hz, the iPad will feel sluggish within a minute.
Brightness follows the same pattern. Xiaomi quotes a peak of 800 nits, and we measured 802 cd/m². The iPad 11 reached only 547 cd/m².
Performance: Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 vs Apple A16
The Pad 9 runs on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, and its Adreno 825 GPU is the faster of the two. In GFXBench Manhattan offscreen, it scored 334 fps against the iPad 11’s 205 fps. In the heavier Aztec Ruins High Tier test the gap grew: 81 fps against 40 fps.
Xiaomi Pad 9 vs iPad 11 – Battery and charging
The Pad 9 has a 9,720 mAh battery and the iPad 11 has 7,606 mAh. In our test the Pad 9 lasted more than 19 hours, and the iPad 11 about 11. That’s roughly eight hours more.
Charging is the other half. The Pad 9 supports 45 W wired charging, PD 3.0, QC 3+ and 22.5 W reverse charging for headphones or a smartwatch. The iPad 11 tops out around 20 W and has no reverse charging.
Price and availability
In China the Pad 9 starts at ¥2,999, about $447. Xiaomi hasn’t announced a global release or regional pricing, so the iPad is still the only one of the two you can easily buy outside China. If you’re not tied to iPadOS, our Xiaomi Pad 9 review has the full test results.
