Apple today announced the new iPad Mini, refreshing its small tablet line more than three years after its predecessor. It’s 2024 now, so it’s no surprise that AI is once again one of the main highlights of the 7th generation iPad Mini, with the remaining upgrades including the faster A17 Pro chipset. It’s available for pre-order starting today, priced at $499.
Despite the long gap since the iPad Mini 6 (review), Apple hasn’t bothered to update the iPad Mini 7’s design and compact specs. The new tablet features the familiar 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display, but is now compatible with the iPad Mini 7. Apple Pencil Pro. However, in addition to Space Gray and Starlight, there are also new finishes in Purple and Blue.
Apple says the 12MP rear camera will be improved and leverages AI for scene detection, while the front 12MP camera will take center stage. There’s also faster Wi-Fi 6E, which is becoming the standard connection for many recently released Apple products. Additionally, the USB-C port is said to offer up to 10 Gbps transfer speeds, or double the previous generation.
Apple iPad Mini 7 is compatible with Apple Pencil Pro. / © Apple
The bigger upgrade is under the hood, with the iPad Mini 7 now equipped with the A17 Pro. The A17 Pro is the SoC that powers last year’s iPhone 15 Pro (review) and is capable of running Apple Intelligence. Apple touts this chip as delivering a 30 percent improvement in CPU and about 25 percent improvement in GPU compared to the A15 Bionic. Similarly, the Neural Engine is noted to be 2x faster than the 2021 iPad Mini chip.
Minimal iPad Entry with Apple Intelligence
Of course, all of the added silicon muscle is designed to support the first set of AI features included in the iPadOS 18.1 update. Apple has not confirmed whether the iPad Mini 7 will work with the firmware out of the box, but did stress that an update is expected to be released later this month.
The first release of Apple Intelligence adds AI-powered writing tools to summarize, proofread, and rewrite text in a variety of writing styles. Elsewhere, Photos debuted a cleanup tool comparable to Google’s Magic Eraser that removes unwanted objects from photos and enhances facial details.
A redesigned and smarter Siri is also part of iPadOS 18.1. Your Assistant can now respond to written text prompts separately from voice commands. It’s even better to build a consistent response from one request to new requests.
Apple plans to roll out more Apple Intelligence features in the next update, which will include integration with Image Playground, Genmoji, on-screen Siri, and ChatGPT.
The iPad Mini 7 is priced at $499, but the base configuration has 128 GB of storage, twice as much as the iPad Mini 6. The cellular model costs $649.
Do you think these changes and improvements in iPad Mini 7 are worth the wait? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
