To the surprise of few, the new iPad mini that Apple announced last week is a small update rather than a major reinvention. It may have been three years between iPad mini updates, but the 2021 model was the first to ditch the formerly ubiquitous home button in favor of smaller bezels. Apple certainly wouldn’t redesign the iPad mini only to do so again after a single generation, so this is another example of a new Apple product that looks the same on the outside but has some notable upgrades on the inside.

What’s new here can be summed up quickly: more storage, support for the Apple Pencil Pro and, most crucially, a more powerful chip. The A17 Pro allows the iPad mini to use Apple Intelligence features when they launch later this month, which is probably why this tablet exists at all. Apple clearly wants to get as many people as possible using these features, and now every iPad the company sells (except for the entry-level model) will work with Apple Intelligence. Of course, that makes fully evaluating the iPad mini tough, because Apple Intelligence isn’t here yet. But there’s still plenty to know if you’re thinking about Apple’s newest tiny tablet.

What’s the same?

As is often the case with new iPads, no one will know whether you’re using the 2021 iPad mini or this one unless they’re an astute study of Apple’s color schemes. This year, extremely mild shades of blue and purple replace the richer pink and purple options — my test iPad mini is purple, but looks like a pretty straight silver in a lot of light. I really wish Apple would provide more bold color options in more of its products, but here we are.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

There isn’t a lot to complain about when it comes to the iPad mini’s design. It feels perfectly in line with the other iPads Apple sells, with modest bezels (that are starting to feel a bit thick) surrounding its screen and stereo speakers when held in landscape orientation. Those speakers sound much better than you’d expect given the mini’s small size; Apple has been putting surprisingly great speakers in all its products for a few years now and I’m glad this trend continues here.

The camera is still portrait-oriented, unlike all the other iPads you can buy. That doesn’t really bother me, because you’re rarely, if ever, going to put this tiny iPad in a keyboard dock and take a video call. I imagine most people making FaceTime calls will just hold it like they would a phone.

As with the prior mini and non-Pro iPads, there’s no Face ID array here. You’ll have to make do with the Touch ID sensor on the power button, which is fast and convenient enough, but still not quite as smooth as Face ID. It also has the same front- and back-facing cameras as the last iPad mini. The 12-megapixel camera on the rear takes surprisingly decent shots in low light and should work fine for scanning documents or QR codes. But as usual, just use your phone to take images and videos — chances are it has a better camera than the iPad mini.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Same goes for the front-facing shooter. It’s fine for FaceTime calls, but photos are lacking in detail. That’s because it’s a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera that then crops them into a more standard field of view. Long story short: this camera is just good enough for a tablet camera, but not much else. And that honestly doesn’t bother me.

The 8.3-inch screen on the iPad mini is about on par with the one on the iPad Air. It supports the P3 wide color gamut, has an antireflective coating and is fully laminated to the front glass, unlike the screen on the entry-level iPad. All these specs, including its resolution and 326 pixel-per-inch density, are unchanged from the last model. It’s a very nice screen, but it’s still a standard LCD display with a now-pedestrian 60Hz refresh rate. I’m not at all surprised by this, as Apple has kept its best screen technology for the iPad Pro. But very soon it’s going to need to up the refresh rate on other iPads (and iPhones if we’re being honest) besides the Pro models.

One bit of good news about the screen is that it seems Apple has fixed the “jelly-scrolling” problem that plagued the prior iPad mini. Jelly-scrolling occurs when one side of a screen doesn’t refresh at exactly the same rate as the other, and this effect was noticeable in portrait mode with the old iPad mini. It’s not something that I ever noticed while using the new iPad mini. I am curious to see if the issue has been totally resolved or if my eyes just didn’t catch it, but I’ll continue using the iPad mini in the coming weeks to see if I spot any display issues.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

What’s new?

The headlining new feature here is the A17 Pro chip, which Apple says is 30 percent faster than the A15 in the prior iPad mini. The 5-core GPU is 25 percent faster and supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. One odd programming note: the A17 Pro in the iPad mini is slightly different from the one in the iPhone 15 Pro series. The chip in the iPhone 15 Pro has six graphics cores, while the one in the iPad mini only has five. It’s a weird bit of minor nerfing, but I also cannot imagine that anyone buying this iPad will notice or care about this slight potential performance difference.

Benchmarks from Geekbench 6 back this up. The A17 Pro in the iPad mini is ever so slightly less performant than the one in the iPhone 15 Pro, but not enough so that it’ll make any real difference in how you use the tablet. It still trails M-series chips and the brand-new A18 series, but provides more than enough juice for an iPad mini.

Some might have hoped for an M2 processor here, or even this year’s A18, but I’m confident that the A17 Pro is more than capable for basically anything you might do with the iPad mini. Given its small size, I never once thought about using it as a laptop replacement like I do with the iPad Pro. Instead, it made a comfortable couch companion for browsing the internet, messaging friends, triaging email, playing games and occasionally editing some photos. The A17 Pro was more than capable of all those tasks, with no slowdowns or stutters to note. Perhaps more importantly, it has the overhead to be capable for years to come.

 

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

The other big change for the iPad mini is support for the Apple Pencil Pro that was introduced earlier this year. I’m glad to see that Apple now supports the Apple Pencil Pro on every iPad it sells aside from the entry-level model. The Pencil lineup was a bit of a mess for a while, but now there are just two options to consider: the $79 USB-C Apple Pencil and the more capable $129 Pencil Pro. Apple still sells the first- and second-generation Pencils for older iPads, but the lineup has thankfully been streamlined going forward.

The Apple Pencil Pro is quite a bit more capable than the standard one. It has pressure sensitivity, haptic feedback, a gyroscope so you can roll the pencil in your hands to change your brush width, a double-tab control to change tools, a “squeeze” feature to bring up the whole tool palette, support for the Find My app and magnetic charging and pairing when you snap it to the side of the iPad mini.

That’s a lot of bonuses for the extra $50, and the combo of the Apple Pencil Pro and iPad mini makes for a tiny but extremely capable digital notebook and canvas. It’s also the same price as the reMarkable Paper Pro tablet and stylus, though the devices have completely different screen types and the iPad does a whole lot more. Depending on what you’re looking for, that might not be a good thing, as a big part of the reMarkable experience is a lack of distractions that can pull you out of focus as well as a better writing experience than you’ll get with a glass LCD screen.

Finally, the iPad mini has 128GB of storage at the $499 price, double what it had before. This is a long-overdue change and makes it possible to recommend someone just grab that base model. There’s also a 512GB option for the first time. And, as usual, you can add 5G connectivity for an extra $150. The model I tried was a top-of-the-line 512GB model with 5G, which retails for a somewhat crazy $949.

Oh, and the new iPad mini supports Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E. Not a game-changer, but good to have the latest wireless specs for future-proofing.

What’s an iPad mini for?

I haven’t used an iPad mini for an extended period of time in years, and as I settled in to testing it, Billie Eilish’s sultry voice drifted into my head, asking “what was I made for?” Yes, this is a highly ridiculous anecdote, but that was what I set out to find: what’s an iPad mini best-used for? It’s definitely not meant to be a laptop replacement, like the much larger and more capable 13-inch iPad Air and iPad Pro I reviewed earlier this year. Instead, it’s an enjoyable secondary device that I mostly used after the workday was done, in place of my MacBook Pro or iPhone.

The iPad mini, on top of an 11-inch iPad Pro, on top of a 13-inch iPad Pro. (Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget)

Reading

It’s a perfectly sized device for reading, whether it’s articles on websites, posts from Substack or novels using the Kindle or Apple Books apps. I still prefer a paper book or a Kindle device, as they’re both much more comfortable than reading on an LCD screen, but the iPad mini is overall a far better reading device than any other iPad. However, this was also one place where I wished the iPad mini had a higher refresh rate. Vertically scrolling through long articles is noticeably jerkier than doing so on my iPhone 14 Pro or an iPad Pro, both of which have 120Hz refresh rates.

Messaging

Its size also makes it a great messaging device, with the portrait-oriented keyboard totally comfortable for two-handed typing. If you’re chatting away in a messaging app, having immediate access to your conversations makes jumping from one contact to another a lot easier. I wouldn’t want to write an article on this, but it was fine for firing off messages. And again, it’s far better suited to this use than bigger iPads.

Gaming

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

The iPad mini also became my go-to Balatro device. The game just hit iOS a few weeks ago and I’ve been completely sucked in, like many of my co-workers. It’s a little cramped on my phone, but feels great on the iPad mini. Other casual games like those you’ll find on Apple Arcade also feel great on the iPad mini, but I did have a tougher time with more fast-paced titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. The on-screen controls felt a little too cramped, something that can of course be alleviated by pairing a Bluetooth controller.

Thanks to the A17 Pro chip, the iPad mini can also play a handful of AAA games that you’d typically expect to see on a console or PC like Death Stranding and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, both of which were announced for the iPhone 15 Pro in September 2023. Only the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 Pro can play these games, along with iPads that have at least an M1 processor. Now that the iPad mini has (essentially) the same chip as the iPhone 15 Pro, those games are available. I haven’t had a chance to test them yet, but I’ll update this review once I get a chance to see how they hold up on this hardware.

Apple Pencil Pro

I’m no visual artist, but I can imagine people who love to draw finding the iPad mini to be a great portable sketchbook. Sometimes, having the larger canvas you can get on an iPad Air or Pro is preferable, but when it comes to something you can throw in your bag and forget about, the iPad mini is unrivaled. I got in the habit of using it as a digital notebook — just pulling the Apple Pencil Pro off the side and tapping the screen opened up a blank note document I could jot my thoughts and to-do items onto.

Watching video

While the iPad mini makes for a fine portable video player, it’s one scenario where I missed a bigger screen. If I was flying cross-country or over the Atlantic, I’d definitely prefer something larger. The standard iPad or the 11-inch iPad Air and Pro are slightly heavier, but they’re well-balanced enough that they aren’t a burden to hold and watch a movie on. If that’s a primary use case for you, consider stepping up to an iPad with a bigger screen.

Battery life

As for battery life, I didn’t always hit the 10 hours Apple promises. Using a variety of the apps and workflows I’ve described, I’d get around eight hours before needing a charge. Of course, those routines typically included a fair bit of gaming, which definitely takes a hit on the battery (even if it’s just casual things like Balatro). I haven’t had time yet to do a video playback battery test, but my guess is that one will come out a lot closer to the standard 10 hours.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Wrap-up

This year’s iPad mini is one of those typical Apple updates that focuses on software and internal hardware rather than a flashy redesign. But that’s OK. If you bought the prior iPad mini, you can safely ignore this one unless you’re really all-in on Apple Intelligence. Anyone else who has a smaller iPad that still has a home button will get a ton of value out of this update. It has one of Apple’s best mobile chips and Apple Pencil Pro support makes it easy to recommend for anyone who wants a portable sketchbook.

I wouldn’t hate an improved display with smaller bezels and a higher refresh rate, and I wouldn’t have said no to an M2 or A18 Pro chip inside, but those are the only things I’d change here. And both would surely make the iPad mini more expensive. As it is, it’s a solid performer for $499. If you just want a little couch computing companion, or a tablet so small and light that you can take it everywhere with you, the iPad mini remains your best choice.