Hands-On With the New iPad Mini 7

Today is the official launch date of the iPad mini 7, which is the first new iPad mini that we’ve had since 2021. It has a much faster chip and a few other tweaks, so we thought we’d check it out and do a quick review.

Apple didn’t change the design of the ‌iPad mini 7‌ compared to the ‌iPad mini‌ 6, and it’s tough to tell them apart from the outside. The colors are more muted this time around, with Apple eliminating pink and adding blue, and the text on the back now says “‌iPad mini‌” instead of “iPad.” Other than that, the ‌iPad mini‌ 6 and ‌iPad mini 7‌ are identical.

Inside, there’s a faster A17 Pro chip that’s a notable improvement over the A15 Bionic, but depending on what you do with your ‌iPad mini‌, you might not notice huge gains in performance. If you play games, it’s going to be a lot faster, plus there’s now support for ray tracing and mesh shading, features that enable console-quality games like Death Stranding.

The major draw of the A17 Pro is support for Apple Intelligence, and the first AI features are set to come out next week in iPadOS 18.1. Right now, Apple Intelligence is limited to Writing Tools, a new look for Siri, summaries, and smart replies, but Genmoji, Image Playground, ChatGPT integration, and more will be coming in iPadOS 18.2, an update Apple started testing just today.

At $499, the ‌iPad mini 7‌ is only $100 less than the more capable and larger M2 iPad Air, so it’s kind of a niche product. It’s not worth choosing an ‌iPad mini‌ over an ‌iPad Air‌ unless you specifically want the smaller 8.3-inch size for portability.

With all of the changes internal, the ‌iPad mini 7‌ is somewhat of a boring update and there’s not a lot to say about it. Along with the A17 Pro, you get 8GB RAM (up from 4GB), Wi-Fi 6E support (for connecting to faster 6GHz networks when available), Bluetooth 5.3, faster USB-C transfer speeds, Apple Pencil Pro support, and higher 128GB base starting storage.

Did you get an ‌iPad mini 7‌ or plan to? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

This article, “Hands-On With the New iPad Mini 7” first appeared on MacRumors.com

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