The new iPad mini arrives Friday with a new design, gorgeous OLED display, and an innovative new speaker system. It’s an interesting update that I expect will broaden the mini’s appeal, especially at the high end, which is the Starlight model Apple sent me last week for testing. There’s a lot going on in this smallest of the iPad lineup, so let’s take a look at what’s new and how it changes the iPad mini’s story.
The Hardware
Apple’s new iPad mini is the 8th generation of the tablet and the first exterior design change since 2021’s 6th generation model. It just so happens that that 2021 mini was the last iPad I bought myself, so it makes for a good point of physical comparison to the 8th generation model that will be in stores Friday.
The new mini is ever so slightly smaller than the last two generations, but you probably won’t notice, unless you look closely. The new mini is 0.9mm thinner, 2.2mm narrower, and 0.1mm shorter. It’s also 34 or 38 grams lighter depending on whether you’re comparing the Wi-Fi or cellular models of the mini, with the Wi-Fi weight difference being the greater of the two. That’s not a lot, although the thinness and lighter weight are noticeable when the new mini is compared side-by-side with an older model.
Besides the dimensions and weight, the corners of the new mini are rounder and the edges are smoother. These, too, are subtle differences, although the smoother edges do make the new mini more comfortable to hold.
The real difference you’ll notice is when you first turn on the 8th generation iPad mini. The new OLED screen is gorgeous. The OLED display is 0.2 inches bigger diagonally than the 6th or 7th generation models, for a total of 8.5 inches diagonally. Combined with the slightly smaller case, that makes for noticeably narrower bezels around the display, which Apple still manages to fit the 12MP Center Stage camera and microphone into on the long edge of the device for the first time.
The new iPad mini’s second microphone and camera with Adaptive True Tone flash peeking out from inside the Taupe TechWoven case.
The new mini’s screen is also brighter – 600 nits compared to 500 nits for older models – with the ability to boost up to 1200 nits for HDR content, something the older models lacked. Like the 7th generation mini, the new one supports the Apple Pencil Pro, and unlike prior models, there’s a $100 nano-texture option, which my review unit doesn’t have, so I can’t comment on it.
The iPhone 18 Pros and the Duo have brighter, denser displays that also support ProMotion, which the iPad mini’s Super Retina XDR display does not. Many Apple fans immediately latched on to the lack of ProMotion as a miss on Apple’s part, and it is at least in the realm of perception. Apple has trained customers that ProMotion displays with their 120Hz refresh rates are the best, and in general, that’s true.
However, I have to say that I haven’t missed it in any meaningful way, while testing the iPad mini. I don’t think I’m as sensitive as some people to the difference between 60 and 120Hz displays, so that’s part of it. However, I can see the difference. Scrolling a web page quickly on the new iPad mini isn’t as smooth as on an M4 iPad Pro, for example. However, to my eye, the practical difference between the iPad mini’s OLED display and a ProMotion display is minor.
That said, if you’re sensitive to refresh rates, do yourself a favor and check out the new iPad mini in person before ordering one. Everyone’s tolerance for this sort of thing is different.
As someone who is coming from the 6th generation iPad mini, I also tested the new mini for jelly scrolling, which became a minor drama after that iPad’s release. I ran side-by-side tests using an online tool that tests for the effect, and it was, indeed, noticeable on the 6th generation mini, but not at all on the new iPad mini.
What the Specs Mean in Practice
I’ve thrown out a lot of specs that are more meaningful to screen technology nerds than others. Stepping back, it’s worth noting that the difference between the new mini’s OLED display and my older mini’s IPS LCD is stark. Movies and TV shows look stunning, the 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio makes games pop, and text is super crisp in every reading app.
I’ve spent time reading in Apple Books, Shonen Jump, Unread, and Readwise Reader, and every single one of them has been a delight to read in. Text is crisp and the brighter, more colorful display makes everything from manga art to photos more vibrant.
Movies, TV shows, and Photos have a new level of impact on the iPad mini, too. Over the weekend, I dropped in on the F1 race being held in Mexico City and was struck by the detail and color of the cars. I caught a little bit of Dark Matter, and it looked terrific, too.
Video games are also much nicer on the new iPad mini than before. The contrast ratio and OLED panel capture the dark, moody vibes of games like Death Stranding: Director’s Cut and Resident Evil Village perfectly, and the recently released No Man’s Sky practically vibrates off of the screen with its brightly colored worlds. Plus, with Wi-Fi 7 available thanks to Apple’s N1 chip, streaming games locally with apps like Steam Link and Moonlight, or over the Internet with a service like GeForce Now, is more seamless, too.
My only caveat about the mini for gaming is that some telescopic controllers are difficult to fit around the mini without the clamping mechanism pressing the power or volume buttons. That’s not a new problem for the mini and a separate standalone Xbox or PS5 controller works well as an alternative, but I prefer treating the mini like a big-screen handheld for obvious reasons.
Sound is a big part of any entertainment experience, and the iPad mini doesn’t disappoint there either. Apple has eliminated the speaker holes on the short sides of the iPad mini, which was what helped achieve its IP67 dust and splash resistance rating. To do that, the mini uses Apple’s new Acoustic Display, a brand-new audio system for the mini. The new setup puts the woofers behind the screen, passing the bass through the screen, while the tweeters fire between the screen and the aluminum enclosure. I was skeptical about how well that would work when Apple originally revealed it, but it works well. Bass is boomier, vocals are more defined, and everything sounds fuller and can get surprisingly loud for such a little tablet.
The 512GB iPad mini’s Dual 16-core Neural Engine
Comparing the 6th generation iPad mini (left), the new iPad mini (center), and the 11-inch M4 iPad Pro (right).
Alright, so we’ve all known that iPads are great for media, and with this update, the iPad mini is better than ever at that, but the other interesting part of this new tablet is under the hood. The new iPad mini features the A20 Pro chip just like the iPhone 18 Pro and Duo, but core counts and other options differ by each of the three storage configurations.
At 128GB of storage, the iPad mini’s A20 Pro chip has a 5-core CPU with two super cores and three efficiency cores. The 256GB model opens up the nano-texture display option. Then, the 512GB model that I’ve been testing adds an additional efficiency CPU core for a total of six cores and has two 16-core Neural Engines compared to the other models’ one Neural Engine. All models also have a 7-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each GPU core.
What that means for users depends a lot on developers and the type of work you do, but one obvious use-case is on-device AI workloads that take advantage of parallelization. That way an app can split a workload and take advantage of both halves of the 512GB iPad mini’s Dual 16-core Neural Engine at once.
The difficulty from a testing perspective is knowing when both Neural Engines are engaged. Apps that Apple cites in its press materials like Draw Things and Detail (where my son works) are both impressive demonstrations of what can be done with local AI models. However, there’s no obvious way for a user to tell when each app is taking advantage of the Dual 16-core Neural Engine.
To get a better sense of the mini’s performance with software optimized for the Neural Engine, I turned to Voz, an on-device speech-to-text model. Desert Ant Labs, founded by the team behind Detail, reports approximately 47% higher transcription throughput on the iPhone 18 Pro than the 17 Pro using Vox. Because the 512GB iPad mini I’ve been testing has a Dual Neural Engine like the iPhone 18 Pro, I was curious whether it could deliver similar performance.
To test this, I had Codex build me a benchmark that takes 10 minutes of AppStories and converts it to text using Voz on the iPad mini. Across three sessions for a total of nine runs, Voz transcribed a 10-minute AppStories clip in about one second on average (excluding model preparation), and every run produced an identical transcript. That’s comparable to the 0.98-second iPhone 18 Pro result in Desert Ant’s SDK documentation. The different audio and possibly different software versions make this an approximate comparison, but the results show how quickly the iPad mini can handle local transcription with a model optimized for Apple’s Neural Engine.
The mini’s local AI capabilities extend beyond software optimized for the Neural Engine. To explore those, I ran Qwen 3.5 4B (4-bit) locally using a benchmark built into Russet, a local AI and developer tool. The 512GB iPad mini averaged a pace of 40 tokens per second across four sessions on both tests that output 128 or 256 tokens with a time to first token of 0.32 seconds for the 128 output token tests and 0.36 for the 256 output token tests.
I couldn’t compare the new mini’s local AI performance to my 6th generation iPad mini because it only has 4GB of memory, which is too little for the models Russet offers for download. Instead, I downloaded the same model on my 11-inch M4 iPad Pro and ran the same Russet benchmark. The A20 Pro came out on top in my tests. The Russet tests I ran use MLX, which runs on the CPU and GPU, so they don’t measure the benefit of the Dual 16-core Neural Engine. However, they do demonstrate the A20 Pro’s serious local AI capabilities.
Everything Else
As I briefly mentioned above, the new iPad mini has a 12 MP Center Stage camera along the long edge of the device, which is handy if you’re using it propped up on a table or holding it in your lap in landscape. The outside camera is a 12MP Wide camera with Adaptive True Tone flash, a feature it shares with the iPad Pros.
As with previous models, there’s no Face ID on the new iPad mini. It’s Touch ID. Face ID would be nice, but I don’t find myself using Touch ID nearly as much with the iPad mini as I do my iPhone Duo, so I haven’t really minded it.
If you buy the Wi-Fi + Cellular model of the iPad mini, it will include Apple’s C2 cellular modem with an eSIM that makes it easy to sign up for a data plan on the iPad itself. The model that Apple sent me to test came with a one-month Verizon plan and the connectivity has been great. I live in an area with spotty cellular coverage, but Verizon’s signal has been stronger and faster than I typically get from AT&T in the same locations.
Finally, Apple sent me a Taupe TechWoven Smart Folio to test along with the iPad mini. So far, I’ve been happy with the Smart Folio, which also comes in Navy Blue and retails for $79. Five days doesn’t put much wear and tear on any case, so the jury’s still out on how it holds up long-term, but I like that the texture of the TechWoven material gives me a little more grip on the iPad as I carry it. The edge of the case extends slightly beyond the frame of the mini, which should help with drops too. As with past cases, the inside of the case is a soft material that helps keep the screen clean and closing the cover puts the iPad mini to sleep.
The Smart Folio has a new system for propping the mini up for hands-free use, too. The cover is divided into two panels. Wrap the cover behind the mini and the edge of the cover will naturally connect to the back of the Smart Folio magnetically at two angles, one of which is nearly perpendicular to the surface the mini is sitting on and the other which leans back a bit more. Flip the mini around so the folded portion of the case is at the top edge of the iPad and you have a shallow angle that’s perfect for writing with the Apple Pencil Pro. I like this Smart Folio design much more than the previous three-panel design. It’s simpler, more elegant, and intuitive to set up.
I’ve only been using the new iPad mini for five days, but it’s been a blast to use a mini again. Suddenly, between it and the iPhone Duo, my life is full of smaller screens, and I kinda love it. That feels weird to admit as I type this article on a 32-inch display, but there’s a lot to be said for having the right screen for the right task.
I also think that increasingly, smaller screens work better for more tasks than they once did. Between input methods like the Apple Pencil and improvements to dictation, keyboards aren’t as necessary to be productive as they once were.
Add great software to the mix, and it’s remarkable what you can get done on a small screen these days. I would never have imagined even a year ago that I could be orchestrating AI agents across four Macs from an iPad mini spreading the load among them with an app like T3 Code to efficiently build tools for myself sitting at a coffee shop miles from my home, but here we are.
And while I’m sure the iPhone Duo will eat into the iPad mini’s user base to a degree, let’s not forget that even the expensive $1,149 iPad mini model I’ve been testing is significantly more affordable than an iPhone Duo and starts at $699. And, while it may not fold in half, the iPad mini also runs iPadOS, which has many more tricks up its sleeve than the Duo does, including freely resizable, overlapping windows, Slide Over, Stage Manager, Sidecar, and Universal Control.
Ultimately, that’s what I love most about the iPad mini. For a device that’s only 9 grams heavier than the iPhone Duo you get the full iPad experience and a cellular connection in a device that may not fit in your pocket, but is as easy to take with you as a paperback book. It’s a chameleon that isn’t a phone or a laptop, adapting to whatever users need from getting work done to sitting back and enjoying a book. That’s never been more true than with the mightier than ever iPad mini.
