Apple today quietly announced a new iPad Mini, the first update to its smallest tablet since 2021 in a press release. Starting at £499, the updated Mini is now up for pre-order and goes on sale from next Wednesday.

It is the new model, with updates in terms of performance: Apple's new A17 Pro chip with a 30 percent-faster CPU, 25 percent-faster GPU, and a Neural Engine - that is twice as fast as in the former versions. It starts at 128GB of storage for the base model, up from 64GB. It also supports the new Apple Pencil Pro, for artists who prefer the compact Mini. While maintaining exactly the same design, the new Mini improves in many areas: it has faster Wi-Fi 6E and a faster USB-C port.
One of the notable design changes is the colour option. Apple now comes with two new colours, purple and blue. However, the variations on these colours are less strong compared to what we can find on the iPhone 16. The last redesign iPad Mini was brought in 2021. This version in its major places remains almost the same as that design while providing some boost in power to aid the AI features through Apple. Apple also stated that the new device has been enabled for hardware-accelerated ray tracing for improved gaming visuals.

The iPad Mini has always felt a bit of an outlier within Apple's tablet lineup, along with the iPhone SE. It maintains a stalwart core of aficionados-particularly among pilots-but if you are looking for more iPads, it is usually the larger iPads that you'll typically find in demand. Apple refreshed the other iPad models last spring, which put their futures into question. But Apple seems content enough to keep the Mini on a different schedule for updating than the rest of its products.