7th generation Three years after its last refresh, Apple’s smallest iPad is finally here. There were no fancy pre-recordings or live events, the company quietly announced the new tablet through its online newsroom. The headline feature that encapsulates this device?Apple Intelligence. Apple’s artificial intelligence features aren’t yet available on iPhone 16, but are expected to arrive this month through iOS 18.1.
Starting at $499 for the base model, the 7th generation iPad Mini has the same chassis as the previous generation, but with several upgrades, including a new processor, support for Apple Intelligence, and double the storage. It also supports the latest Apple Pencil Pro. Pre-orders are currently being accepted and will be shipped on October 23rd.
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It’s the contents
The 6th generation iPad Mini received a major facelift in 2021, so it’s no surprise that Apple kept the external features the same with this version. The tablet features an 8.3-inch LCD screen, slim bezels, a 12-megapixel selfie camera, and a USB-C port (data transfer speeds are now 10 Gbps). The rear camera has a 12-megapixel sensor with Smart HDR 4 support. Smart HDR 4 is the latest image processing algorithm with the ability to detect and scan documents from the camera app (this feature was confirmed to be introduced on iPad Pro with M4 in May). .
The more important changes are under the hood. Apple has upgraded the processor from the A15 (the chipset in the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro models) to the A17 Pro, which is exactly the same as the iPhone 15 Pro. The company claims that the 6-core CPU delivers a 30 percent increase in CPU performance, while the 5-core GPU delivers a 25 percent increase compared to the previous model. Neural Engine, on the other hand, is twice as fast.
Having this chip in iPad Mini means it can support Apple Intelligence, a set of artificial intelligence tools introduced in iOS 18.1. This makes the iPad Mini the cheapest tablet in the lineup with these features. Other supported models include 5th generation M1 iPad Air, 6th generation M2 iPad Air, 5th generation M1 iPad Pro, 6th generation M2 iPad Pro, and 7th generation M4 iPad Pro.
