The New iPad Mini Gets an Apple Intelligence Boost

The seventh generation of Apple’s tiniest iPad is finally here, three years since its last refresh. There was no fancy pretaped or live event—the company quietly announced the new tablet through its online newsroom. The headline feature encapsulating this device? Apple Intelligence. Apple’s artificial intelligence features still aren’t available for the iPhone 16, but they’re due to arrive this month via iOS 18.1.

Starting at $499 for the base model, the seventh-gen 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’s available for preorder now and ships October 23.

It’s What’s Inside

The sixth-generation iPad Mini got a major facelift in 2021, so it’s not shocking that Apple kept the external features the same in this iteration. This tablet packs an 8.3-inch LCD screen, slim bezels, and a 12-megapixel selfie camera, along with a USB-C port (now with 10-Gbps data transfer speeds). The rear camera has a 12-megapixel sensor with support for Smart HDR 4, an updated image processing algorithm with the capability to detect and scan documents from the Camera app (a feature we saw introduced back in May with the M4-powered iPad Pro).

The more significant changes are inside. Apple upgraded the processor from the A15 (the chipset inside the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro models) to an A17 Pro, the very same that’s in the iPhone 15 Pro. With a six-core CPU, the company claims it delivers a 30 percent boost in CPU performance while the five-core GPU offers 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 coming in iOS 18.1. It makes the iPad Mini the cheapest tablet of the lineup to have these features. Other supported models include the fifth-gen M1 iPad Air, sixth-gen M2 iPad Air, fifth-gen M1 iPad Pro, sixth-gen M2 iPad Pro, and seventh-gen M4 iPad Pro.