Apple has given its smallest tablet its biggest overhaul in years, and the headline upgrade comes with a price tag that deserves as much attention as the screen. According to TechCrunch, Apple announced the new iPad mini on Monday, October 26, just two days before its Pro and Tell event on Wednesday.
The Screen Steals the Show
The star of the update is an 8.5-inch OLED Super Retina XDR display, replacing the 8.3-inch LCD of the previous model. Bezels are 24 percent thinner, so the larger screen fits in roughly the same footprint, and Apple says peak brightness reaches 1,200 nits, more than double the previous generation, with 600 nits of full-screen brightness and a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
OLED brings pixel-level lighting control, which means deeper blacks, richer contrast and P3 wide color support. Apple has also added a nano-texture display option from the iPad Pro for bright-light work, plus an Acoustic Display system with woofers built into the screen for deeper bass. A 12-megapixel Center Stage camera now sits on the landscape edge for video calls, and the whole device is just 5.4 mm thick.
A20 Pro, in Plain Terms
Under the glass sits the A20 Pro chip, which Apple says delivers up to 60 percent faster multithreaded performance for everyday tasks like photo editing and multitasking. Its 7-core GPU carries Neural Accelerators in each core, giving up to 4.5 times faster AI performance than the previous generation, according to TechCrunch, and the tablet launches with iPadOS 27 and the next generation of Apple Intelligence and Siri.
Durability gets a quiet but real upgrade too. The new iPad mini is the first in the line rated IP67 for water and dust resistance, and it gains Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread through Apple’s N1 wireless chip, with a C2 modem on cellular models.
The Price Story Nobody Should Skip
Here is where the launch gets interesting. The new iPad mini starts at $699 for Wi-Fi and $849 for Wi-Fi plus cellular. As MacRumors reports, that is $100, or 17 percent, more than the previous generation’s $599 starting price, and the increase is not offset by extra storage: the base model still starts at 128GB.
Zoom out and the climb is steeper: the previous generation held a $499 price in 2024 even after Apple doubled base storage to 128GB, then rose to $599 earlier this year amid memory and chip shortages. Two hikes later the mini costs $200 more than two years ago, education pricing starts at $649, the new TechWoven Smart Folio is up to $79 from $59, and colors have narrowed from four finishes to two.
What OLED Does Not Fix
Buyers should not mistake OLED for a faster screen. As Pocket-lint notes, the new iPad mini still lacks ProMotion, meaning its display runs at 60Hz despite the OLED upgrade. Scrolling and Apple Pencil work will look the same as before in motion, even though colors and contrast are dramatically better.
That distinction matters because OLED has become shorthand for premium in shoppers’ minds. Apple is selling a better-looking screen, not a smoother one, and anyone upgrading mainly for buttery scrolling will be disappointed.
Why This Matters
The iPad mini’s identity has always been the smallest fully capable iPad, and this update protects that identity while quietly repricing it: a genuinely better display, a much faster chip, real water resistance and modern wireless, but the $699 entry fee now buys the screen upgrade, not more storage, and extras like the folio case cost more too.
Timing sharpens the decision. Pre-orders open Wednesday, October 28, the same morning as Apple’s Pro and Tell event, with availability starting Friday, November 6. Buyers will be asked to commit before they have seen everything else Apple announces that week, so the smart move is to weigh the mini on its own merits: a superb small tablet that now costs like one, too.
Meanwhile in Gadgets: Apple’s wearable experiments continue elsewhere, with the reported screenless Apple fitness band taking a very different approach to health tracking, and Samsung’s clip-on audio shows how far gadget design has strayed from the earbud, in our look at the Galaxy Buds On clip-on earbuds.
