Broken screen and home button being fixed or dead

Hello, so I have my family's old iPad 3 mini. the screen is broken and so is the Home Screen. I cannot connect it to my computer bc it's disabled as well. I was wondering if there was any way to fix it or is it just dead? there's apps on here that I want and photos too. am willing to save money to take it to apple and get it fixed. ill try to describe the home button damage


  • it is completely loose from the back. its not connected to anything and the part that goes over it is disconnected as well. you cannot press it and it just moves around behind the place where its under.
  • the screen has a crack going through the middle where the button is

iPad, iPadOS 18

Posted on Sep 26, 2025 11:02 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 29, 2025 10:15 AM

Your iPad mini3 is obsolete. Apple no longer offers support or repair services for this and similar models of iPad.


Your only potential option to revive your iPad mini3 would be to use a third-party repair shop - who would either use parts scavenged from other broken iPads of the same model, or will use third party parts. In either case, you must understand that (a) all locally stored data will be lost, and (b) the cost of repairing an obsolete iPad is unlikely to be an economic proposition.


You would be well advised to reconsider revival of your broken iPad - and instead spend your money in replacing the iPad with a much newer or current model iPad that supports iPadOS 26 and current Apps.


If you have an existing iCloud or iTunes backup of your broken iPad, this can be restored to the replacement iPad. Any files synchronised with iCloud will remain directly accessible. As is, any locally stored data that is not included within a pre-existing backup is almost certainly irretrievably lost.

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 29, 2025 10:15 AM in response to swiini

Your iPad mini3 is obsolete. Apple no longer offers support or repair services for this and similar models of iPad.


Your only potential option to revive your iPad mini3 would be to use a third-party repair shop - who would either use parts scavenged from other broken iPads of the same model, or will use third party parts. In either case, you must understand that (a) all locally stored data will be lost, and (b) the cost of repairing an obsolete iPad is unlikely to be an economic proposition.


You would be well advised to reconsider revival of your broken iPad - and instead spend your money in replacing the iPad with a much newer or current model iPad that supports iPadOS 26 and current Apps.


If you have an existing iCloud or iTunes backup of your broken iPad, this can be restored to the replacement iPad. Any files synchronised with iCloud will remain directly accessible. As is, any locally stored data that is not included within a pre-existing backup is almost certainly irretrievably lost.

Sep 27, 2025 3:12 AM in response to swiini

it's old back 2014


doubt it would be worth is to fix it


if you have problems connecting it to your computer because that has issues then you can likely get the photos from using another computer than your own


apps are not tied to your old ipad they are tied to your appleID so if you use that on a new ios device then you can get them again.

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Broken screen and home button being fixed or dead

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