Apple iPad mini A20 Pro: specs, price, release

Apple has announced the OLED iPad mini with an A20 Pro chip and IP67 rating. It starts at $699 and arrives November 6.

Earlier today, the first signs arrived that Apple would announce its new touchscreen MacBooks and more as a series of daily reveals leading up to Wednesday's touchscreen MacBook announcement. And so it has proved, with Monday being the day earmarked for news of a new iPad mini.

With availability starting Friday, November 6, it gets a decent spec bump over the previous generation released in 2024. It also gets an unfortunate price bump too, coming in at a starting price of $699, $200 more than before (though it has been raised to $599 since).

Weight loss program

It is both thinner and lighter than the 2024 model. It weighs 255 g (0.56 lb) in WiFi form and 263 g (0.58 lb) with cellular, down from 293 g (0.65 lb) and 297 g (0.66 lb) on the 2024 model. It is also 0.9 mm (0.04 in) thinner at 5.4 mm (0.21 in) against 6.3 mm (0.25 in), a cut of roughly 14%. Height is essentially unchanged at 195.3 mm (7.69 in), but width drops 2.2 mm (0.09 in) to 132.6 mm (5.22 in).

It is based around an 8.5-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display, up from 8.3-inch, which (mostly) keeps the previous mini’s footprint thanks to 24% thinner bezels. It supports the P3 wide color gamut, with peak brightness up to 1200 nits (more than 2x the previous generation), 600 nits full-screen for SDR and HDR, a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and a 1-nit minimum brightness. A nano-texture option is available for the 256 and 512 GB models.

It’s powered by the latest A20 Pro chip built on a 2 nm process and has a 7-core GPU with Neural Accelerators in each core and up to a 6-core CPU. Apple claims up to 4.5x faster AI performance, up to 2.7x faster graphics, and up to 60% faster multithreaded CPU performance than the previous generation, plus more than 2x the unified memory bandwidth.

The 512 GB configuration adds a Dual 16-core Neural Engine.

New Acoustic Display

Alongside the very welcome presence of IP67 water and dust resistance, probably its biggest innovation rather than iteration comes with the new Acoustic Display. This pairs woofers through the display with custom tweeters located between the glass and aluminum enclosure. It will be interesting to see how this performs, with the first feedback likely from the Pro and tell event on Wednesday, as such designs can lack bottom end and stereo width, especially at the iPad mini scale.

Elsewhere, the 12 MP Center Stage front camera moves to the landscape edge, while the 12 MP Wide back camera supports Smart HDR 4 and 4K video at up to 60 fps, and gains an Adaptive True Tone flash. The new Apple N1 chip provides WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. Cellular models use the C2 modem, with up to 50% faster data speeds than the previous generation, and support eSIM. Fast-charge is also supported.

Pricing and availability

US pricing starts at $699 for WiFi and $849 for WiFi + Cellular, in 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB configurations. Pre-orders open Wednesday, October 28 in 36 countries and regions.