It’s been a three year wait for a new bite-sized iPad from Apple, but the iPhone maker has finally revealed a new iPad mini, aka the iPad mini 7. Though it’s looking very familiar from the outside, it’s what’s under the hood that’s worth getting excited about.
The seventh-generation outing for the smallest tablet in Apple’s range, the timing of the launch is significant — the new iPad mini lands just ahead of the rollout of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s big AI play, and the tablet has all the internal chops needed to take full advantage of it.
Underneath an 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display sits the A17 Pro chipset. Though that’s not Apple’s latest mobile chipset, it is the one you’ll find in the still-excellent iPhone 15 Pro line-up — and, crucially, it’s compatible with Apple Intelligence. It’s a decent spec bump over the previous iPad mini’s chipset too, with comparatively 30% faster CPU and 25% faster GPU capabilities, and 2x better Neural Engine performance for those all-important AI tasks. That GPU unlocks fancy graphics features too, like real-time ray-tracing, Dynamic Caching and hardware-accelerated mesh shading.
It also opens up support for the Apple Pencil Pro (sold separately), Apple’s latest digital stylus, that allows for greater sketching flexibility with a barrel-rolling sensor tip for finer art work and supporting haptic feedback.
But it’ll be Apple Intelligence, in this form factor, that’ll be most tempting tablet fans. Like a super-charged Siri, and woven right through the iPadOS 18 interface that the new iPad mini will ship with, it’ll let you ask complicated questions of the iPad and get contextually-aware answers in response. It’ll help organise your calendar, summarise meeting notes and notifications, improve your writing and even let you generate imagery from text prompts.
For anything that Apple Intelligence can’t do, a back-up ChatGPT service will be available at request — with Apple promising to ensure you’re private information is kept safe through its Private Cloud Compute service. Personal information and requests stay on device with Apple Intelligence, and will never be stored by Chat GPT.
Rounding off the new iPad mini are connectivity improvements (Wi-Fi 6E, 5G cellular support and a 2x faster USB-C port for data transfers up to 10Gbps), and an upgraded 12MP camera that will leverage the 16-core Neural Engine to bring the best out of your shots.
The new iPad mini can be pre-ordered from today, starting at £499 / $499 for a 128GB model, before going on general sale on October 23rd.
