The iPad mini 7 surprised us all when it was suddenly announced earlier this week. And another surprise is that one of its main upgrades isn't quite as potent as we thought.
The biggest hardware update to the iPad mini 7 over the still-excellent iPad mini 6 from 2021 is the use of an A17 Pro chip (first seen in the iPhone 15 Pro last year) in place of the older model's A15 silicon. That is a good upgrade, no question, but it's since come to light that the iPad mini's chip won't be quite as powerful as the iPhone 15 Pro's version.
If you go to the new iPad mini's specs page on Apple's site, you’ll see under the "Chip" section that the A17 Pro contains 6 CPU cores, 5 GPU cores and 16 NPU cores. But the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chip offers 6 GPU cores instead, meaning the A17 Pro inside the iPad mini still has 6 GPU cores, but one of them has been turned off permanently. While we'd have to benchmark the new iPad to be sure, this will likely have a performance impact on gaming and other demanding apps.
This process, known as "chip binning", is something Apple does a lot with its chips, since it allows the same silicon to offer lower performance levels by disabling cores. For instance, the M3 chip used in the MacBook Air has two fewer GPU cores than the version used in the basic 14-inch MacBook Pro, despite being the same chip otherwise.
Reasons not to miss that extra GPU core
The important thing is that this small downgrade to the A17 Pro won't block the iPad mini's access to Apple Intelligence, the other major upgrade it has compared to the last iPad mini. The features aren't live in iPadOS 18 yet, but are expected to roll out before the end of this month.
There are several other ways Apple has updated the iPad mini for 2024. The new model has Apple Pencil Pro support, has doubled the default storage to 128GB and the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, and comes in new Blue and Purple color options, all while costing the same as the last iPad mini did at launch, starting at $499/£499/A$799.
Anyone looking to buy themself an iPad mini is able to pre-order one now, and can buy one on open sale from October 23. If you're not certain about buying one yet, then check back with us soon for a review of Apple's newest and smallest iPad.
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