Apple’s New iPad mini Sports an A17 Pro Chip and Support for Pencil Pro

Apple announced a significant power upgrade for the iPad mini series this morning with a new model that packs the A17 Pro chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 15 Pro — along with support for the Pencil Pro.

That A17 Pro chip allows the iPad mini to handle more demanding tasks, from graphic design to video games. It has a faster CPU and GPU along with a 2x faster Neural Engine versus the last generation iPad mini. It is also powerful enough for Apple Intelligence, which is scheduled to become available later this month.

To recap, the A17 Pro features a six-core CPU (two performance cores and four efficiency cores) and brings a 30% boost in CPU performance vs the A15 Bionic. On the graphics front, it features a five-core GPU that represents a 25% performance boost.

A17 Pro also brings a boost in graphics performance with a 5-core GPU, delivering a 25 percent jump over the previous generation.1 A17 Pro brings entirely new experiences — including pro apps used by designers, pilots, doctors, and others — and makes it faster than ever for users to edit photos, dive into more immersive AR applications, and more.

“A17 Pro brings entirely new experiences — including pro apps used by designers, pilots, doctors, and others — and makes it faster than ever for users to edit photos, dive into more immersive AR applications, and more,” Apple says. “The new iPad mini brings true-to-life gaming with hardware-accelerated ray tracing — which is 4x faster than software-based ray tracing — as well as support for Dynamic Caching and hardware-accelerated mesh shading.”

The iPad mini features an 8.3-inch Liquid retina display (although Apple did not state how bright the screen gets, but it appears to be the same display as the last generation model) and the promise of “all day” battery life. The iPad mini will support all of the upcoming Apple Intelligence features, including a more intelligent Siri, the revamped Photos app, Image Playground generative AI, and integration with ChatGPT.

The new tablet also supports WiFi 6E and a USB-C port with data transfer support up to 10Gbps to import and export files and photos quickly. Speaking of photos, the iPad mini has a single 12-megapixel camera on the back as well as a 12-megapixel front-facing camera that supports Center Stage. Apple Pencil Pro is also fully supported.

Available in blue, purple, starlight, and space gray, the new iPad mini starts at $499 for the Wi-Fi model and $649 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. Pre-orders start today and Apple will begin shipping the new iPad mini on October 23.

Image credits: Apple