The seventh generation Apple’s smallest iPad is finally here, three years since its first update. There was no recorded or live event—the company quietly announced the new tablet through its online newsroom. The headline feature that covers this device? Apple Intelligence. Apple’s artificial intelligence features are not yet available on the iPhone 16, but should arrive this month with iOS 18.1.
Starting at $499 for the base model, the seventh-generation iPad Mini has the same chassis as its predecessor, but with a few upgrades including a new processor, support for Apple Intelligence, and double the storage. It also works with the latest Apple Pencil Pro. It is available for pre-order now and ships on October 23rd.
Courtesy of Apple
That’s What’s Inside
The sixth-generation iPad Mini received a major facelift in 2021, so it’s no surprise that Apple has kept the external features the same for this iteration. This tablet packs an 8.3-inch LCD screen, thin bezels, a 12-megapixel selfie camera, and a USB-C port (now with 10-Gbps data transfer speeds). The rear camera has a 12-megapixel sensor supported by Smart HDR 4, an updated image processing algorithm with the ability to recognize and scan documents in the Camera application (a feature we saw introduced back in May with the M4-powered iPad Pro) .
The most important changes are inside. Apple has upgraded the processor from the A15 (the chipset inside the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro models) to the A17 Pro, the same one in the iPhone 15 Pro. With the six-core CPU, the company claims it delivers a 30 percent increase in CPU performance while the five-core GPU provides a 25 percent jump compared to the previous model. Meanwhile, the neural engine is twice as fast.
Putting this chip inside the iPad Mini means it can support Apple Intelligence—a suite of artificial intelligence tools that come with iOS 18.1. It makes the iPad Mini the cheapest tablet on the list to have these features. Other supported models include the fifth-generation M1 iPad Air, the sixth-generation M2 iPad Air, the fifth-gen M1 iPad Pro, the sixth-gen M2 iPad Pro, and the seventh-gen M4 iPad Pro.
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