Apple's New iPad Mini: A17 Pro Chip, 12MP Camera, Pencil Pro And More

Apple has introduced the new iPad mini, powered by the A17 Pro chip and supporting Apple Intelligence. The device features iPadOS 18, a 12MP wide back camera, 8.3-inch liquid retina display and Apple pencil pro, and is available in four finishes.

Here’s a look at its main specs and features:

The new mini’s A17 Pro chipset, with a faster 6-core central processing unit and 5-core GPU graphics processing unit, along with a 16-core neural engine, is expected to deliver improved performance than the previous-generation iPad mini.

According to Apple, the A17’s hardware-accelerated ray tracing is 4x faster than software-based ray tracing—improving gaming experiences—and supports dynamic caching and hardware-accelerated mesh shading for visually complex and graphics-intensive games.

With Apple Pencil Pro, users can sketch, take notes, journal and annotate. Apple Pencil Pro can sense a user’s squeeze, bringing up a palette for switching tools, line weights and colours. Rotating the barrel changes the orientation of pen and brush tools, and with the hover feature, users can visualise the orientation of a tool before making a mark. Apple Pencil Pro is stored through a new magnetic interface on the mini.

The new iPad mini has 12MP wide back camera, with Smart HDR 4 offering more detailed and vivid pictures, along with 12MP ultra wide front camera in portrait orientation. The device uses artificial intelligence to automatically identify documents in the camera app and remove shadows from documents using true tone flash.

The device will support Apple Intelligence when it’s reportedly introduced with the iPadOS 18.1 on Oct. 28. Users will be able to access features such as Writing Tools, Memories and Clean Up in Photos and an updated Siri.

The device supports wi-fi 6E, so downloading files, playing games online and streaming movies becomes faster. Cellular models of the new iPad mini are activated with eSIM, which is more secure than a physical SIM card. The USB-C port is also faster than the previous generation, with data transfers up to 10Gbps, according to Apple.

The device comes in four finishes: two new—blue and purple—along with starlight and space grey.

The new iPad mini starts with 128GB of storage, double the storage of the previous generation. It is also available in 256GB and 512GB configurations.

The device starts at Rs 44,900 for wi-fi model and Rs 64,900 for wi-fi + cellular version. Customers can pre-order starting Oct. 15.