Apple’s new iPad mini is here; gets A17 Pro, Apple Intelligence [see pricing & features]

Apple has once again made headlines with the launch of its new iPad mini.The new iPad mini is powered by the A17 Pro chip and supports Apple Intelligence, a personal intelligence system that understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant while protecting user privacy.

The new iPad mini comes in four finishes, including a new blue and purple, and features an 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display. The A17 Pro chip delivers a significant performance boost for even the most demanding tasks, with a faster CPU and GPU, a 2x faster Neural Engine than the previous-generation iPad mini, and support for Apple Intelligence.

The integration of Apple Intelligence in the new iPad mini enhances daily tasks by providing advanced writing tools that can rewrite, proofread, and summarize text, enabling more efficient document editing. It supports natural language interactions with Siri, allowing for a more intuitive experience. The system also includes image generation features, like the Image Wand tool, which transforms sketches into polished images, and advanced photo editing, such as the Clean Up tool for removing unwanted objects.

A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence

The new iPad mini gets a major update with A17 Pro, delivering incredible performance and power efficiency in an ultraportable design. A17 Pro is a powerful chip that unlocks a number of improvements over A15 Bionic in the previous-generation iPad mini.

With a 6-core CPU — two performance cores and four efficiency cores — A17 Pro delivers a 30 percent boost in CPU performance. A17 Pro also brings a boost in graphics performance with a 5-core GPU, delivering a 25 percent jump over the previous generation. 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.

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. From creating engaging content faster than ever in Affinity Designer, to playing demanding, graphics-intensive AAA games like Zenless Zone Zero, users can take the powerful performance and ultraportable iPad mini anywhere.

With the power of the A17 Pro chip, the new iPad mini delivers support for Apple Intelligence. Deeply integrated into iPadOS 18, Apple Intelligence harnesses the power of Apple silicon and Apple-built generative models to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks. Many of the models that power Apple Intelligence run entirely on device, and Private Cloud Compute offers the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon servers.

The first set of Apple Intelligence features will be available in U.S. English this month through a free software update with iPadOS 18.1, and available for iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later. 

The new iPad mini features all-day battery life with iPadOS 18 and starts at Rs 49,900 for the Wi-Fi model and Rs 64,900 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. The storage in the base model is now doubled at 128GB, but you also get 256GB and 512GB options. The new Smart Folio, available in charcoal grey, light violet, denim, and sage, is Rs 6,500.