New iPad mini brings support for Apple Intelligence and Pencil | TechCrunch

Apple Tuesday unveiled a new version of the iPad mini updated for the era of Apple Intelligence. The arrival is powered by the A7 Pro chip, bringing compatibility with Apple Intelligence, the company’s new generative AI offering.

The new arrival marks the first major update to the 8.3-inch device since 2021. The A17 Pro, meanwhile, was announced last year, arriving on the iPhone 15 Pro. That premium device, in turn, became the first of Apple’s phones to officially support Apple Intelligence. That changed with a September event, which brought the feature to the newly announced iPhone 16 line.

The A17 Pro sports a six-core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores and a five-core GPU. Both should deliver significant performance improvements over the A16 Bionic that shipped with the 2021 model. The big news on that front is the neural engine, which delivers access to Apple Intelligence through iPadOS 18.

Highlights on Apple’s small-model answer to the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini include writing tools and a fully refreshed Siri experience. Apple Intelligence is still a work in progress, however. Other features, like Image Playground graphic generation and ChatGPT integration with Apple Intelligence, are still on the way.

The addition means that Apple Intelligence is now available across the iPad line. It is, however, the only of the four devices to sport a mobile chip, as opposed to the M4 found in the latest base iPad and iPad Pro. The iPad Air, meanwhile, runs on the older M2.

The new iPad is also getting the revamped Calculator app, which responds to handwritten notes. On that front, the mini is compatible with Apple’s Pencil and Pencil Pro, bringing more flexibility for artists and those who simply prefer to write notes.

The rear-facing 12-megapixel wide-angle camera supports Smart HDR 4 for better-balanced lighting in photos. The mini maintains the TouchID functionality built into the Power button, rather than graduating to FaceID, which is available on the Pro model.

The new iPad starts at $499 for 128GB of storage, which is double what its predecessor started with. The iPad mini with cellular connectivity, meanwhile, starts at $649. The tablet is up for pre-order today and starts shipping on October 23.