Apple silently revealed a brand-new variation of its iPad small tablet by means of news release today, the tablet’s very first upgrade because 2021.

The seventh-generation iPad mini looks mainly similar to the sixth-generation variation, with a power-button-mounted Touch ID sensing unit and a slim-bezeled screen. Apple has actually switched out the A15 Bionic chip for the Apple A17 Pro, the very same processor it utilized in the iPhone 15 Pro last year.

The brand-new iPad mini is readily available for preorder now and begins at $499 for 128GB (an upgrade over the previous base design’s 64GB of storage). 256GB and 512GB variations are readily available for $599 and $799, and cellular connection is an extra $150 on top of any of those rates.

Apple states the A17 Pro’s CPU efficiency is 30 percent much faster than the A15’s which its GPU efficiency is 25 percent much faster (in addition to supporting hardware-accelerated ray tracing). The most significant enhancement will be a boost in RAM– the A17 Pro comes with 8GB rather of the A15’s 4GB, which appears to be Apple’s flooring for the brand-new Apple Intelligence AI functions. The brand-new iPad mini will be the only iPad mini efficient in supporting Apple Intelligence, which will start presenting with the iPadOS 18.1 upgrade within the next couple of weeks.