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The new redesigned iPad mini. [credit: Apple ]
After years of being stuck with the same look and features, Apple’s iPad mini will finally get a major redesign akin to last year’s iPad Air update, the company announced today . The tablet’s screen size gets a bump from 7. 9 to 8. 3 inches plus includes a new A15 Bionic processor that Apple says is “up to 80% faster” than the A12 chip in the old iPad mini 4. But the particular redesign also comes with a price hike—the new iPad small starts at $499 for the Wi-Fi model with 64GB of storage, $100 more than typically the previous model.
Like other recent iPads and iPhones, the iPad mini drops this home button to make more room on the front of often the device for a larger, almost edge-to-edge screen. However, the device does not feature Face ID like the iPad Pro. Rather, it follows the 2020 iPad Air in featuring a TouchID fingerprint reader around the power button for authentication. It also leaves behind Apple’s long-standing, proprietary Lightning port in favor of industry standard USB-C—a change that also came to other recent iPad redesigns. The flat edges of the tablet bring the new mini’s design within line with the iPad Air 4 and post-2018 iPad Pros. The design also enables Apple Pencil 2 compatibility.
An overview of the new iPad mini’s features. (credit: Apple)
Internally, your A15 chip combines a six-core CPU (that’s two high-performance cores and four low-power efficiency cores) that Apple says is 40% faster than the A12 in addition to a 5-core GPU that the exact company says is 80% faster than the A12. Both the very rear and front-facing cameras get significant upgrades—the 8MP rear camera in the mini 4 is bumped up to 12MP in the brand new model, and the front-facing camera will get a 12MP resolution bump and even support for the face-and-body-tracking “Center Stage” feature from the 2021 iPad Benefits. Support for 5G and Wi-Fi 6 round out the connectivity features.
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