You already have your giant iPhones with the iPhone 16 Pro Max covered, but what if you wanted all that juicy AI goodness with a little more screen? Apple debuted its new iPad mini on Tuesday, showing a 7th edition small tablet with the Cupertino, California company’s latest mobile chip while promising it will be ready for AI.
The new $500 Mini is packing the A17 Pro, the same chip found in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. It’s been three years since we had the last iPad mini, but the main changes to the design are mostly internal. It still houses an 8.3-inch “Liquid Retina” LCD, but Apple said the 7th-gen version should be much more capable with CPU and GPU. The bigger NPU should mean better background AI processing than the 6th-gen’s hexacore CPU.
No, it won’t be as powerful as the recent iPad Air and especially not the M4 iPad Pro, but the new tiny iPad will be a bit more capable than the last generation with support for Apple Pencil Pro—something that can’t be said for most pre-2024 iPads—as well as the Pencil’s Hover feature. It now supports WiFi 6E compared to WiFi 6 of the previous generation (not even the latest iPad Pro supports WiFi 7). There’s additional support for Bluetooth 5.3, which you should expect from any new device in 2024. The new iPad mini also supports transfer speeds up to 10 GB/s compared to the 5 GB/s of the 2021 Mini.
This latest release is supposed to mark another device capable of supporting Apple Intelligence. It’s running on iPadOS 18 out of the box. The tiny iPad should still get some of the best new OS features, like Math Notes and transcripts in Audio Recording. It’s still packing a 12MP wide camera on the rear, and it comes in four colors, ranging from the usual gray and starlight to a teal-hued blue and a light purple.
As for the long-promised AI features, the iPad mini will support Writing Tools for summarizing and rewriting text, plus a few Magic Eraser-like pixel replacement tools called Clean Up for removing unwanted elements from photos. Siri will have a new look when activating the assistant, plus it should have a few AI capabilities that will help it understand questions even when you stumble over your words.
The true Siri upgrade, which will let it operate on your phone between apps, is expected to be available sometime in 2025. According to Apple, AI image generation and ChatGPT integration will take a few more months.
The iPad Mini starts at $500 for 128 GB, which is significant since it’s two times the starting storage of the previous Mini at the same price. Otherwise, you can get the 256 GB version for $600 or opt for 512 GB for $800. Cellular connectivity through eSIM will push that price even higher. The device is up for preorder now and is set to ship on Oct. 23.
Update: 10/15/2024 at 2:27 p.m. ET: This post was updated to correct the mention of the A17 Pro chip being in the iPhone 15 Pro.
