Apple just announced a new, faster iPad Mini

Apple just announced, in a somewhat understated fashion via a press release, a new iPad Mini. It’s the first upgrade for Apple’s smallest tablet since 2021. The new Mini starts at $499. It’s up for pre-order now and goes on sale next Wednesday.

The new Mini is mostly a spec bump: it runs a new A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has a 30 percent faster CPU, 25 percent faster GPU, and a Neural Engine twice as fast as the previous model. The device also supports the new Apple Pencil Pro, which is a nice touch for the Mini-toting artists out there, and comes with 128GB of storage in the base model rather than 64GB. (Those AI models need all the space they can get.) The Wi-Fi 6E chip is faster, the USB-C port is faster, everything about the iPad Mini is the same as before only faster this time.

The only real design change with the new Mini is the colors. Apple’s gone more colorful with a lot of its products this year, and the Mini comes in new purple and blue models. In photos they look muted rather than vivid, though, so don’t expect the eye-popping new colors on the iPhone 16.

The last-gen Mini was a pretty big overhaul, with a new design and a USB-C port along with a bunch of spec upgrades. Given that that was the first redesign since the original Mini in 2012, it’s not terribly surprising that this Mini looks a lot like the last Mini. The big spec bump makes sense, too: as Apple goes all-in on AI and Apple Intelligence, it needs all the power it can get on basically every device in its lineup. Apple also mentioned in its release that the new device can do hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which should make some high-end games look better, but this is clearly an AI-focused upgrade.

The Mini has always been something of an oddity in Apple’s tablet lineup, similar to the iPhone SE: it has fans who love it for the smaller size, but Apple has always intimated that there aren’t actually that many of those fans. Yes, pilots love their iPad Minis, but it seems clear that most people prefer the big screen to the small one.

Apple updated the rest of the iPad lineup earlier this year, adding the super-powerful M4 chip to the Air, redesigning the Pro, and dropping the price of the base model to $349. The Mini, as it has in the past, looked like the odd tablet out, which made some people wonder whether Apple was actually planning to keep making the Mini. But it seems Apple’s just happy keeping the Mini on a slightly different update cadence from the rest of its tablets.