After almost a month at or near its full retail price of $499, the latest iPad Mini (7th generation) is back down to its almost-lowest-ever price of $399. Even though we’re coming up to its first anniversary of when it hit the market (October 2024), it’s still a fairly capable and newish device.
Its predecessor, the iPad Mini (6th generation), was released in September 2021, so if you’ve been hesitating to the pull the trigger on a new iPad Mini because you’re waiting for the eighth generation, you may as well quit waiting and just do it while it’s on sale.,
big things in small packages
Despite the moniker of “Mini,” the iPad Mini isn’t the cheapest iPad in the lineup. That would be the iPad. That’s it. Just plain-Jane “iPad.” Sometimes people refer to the latest generation as the iPad A16, named for the A16 chip that drives it.
Now in its seventh generation, the latest iPad Mini (like the iPad Air M3) has P3 color space for a wider range of color than the base-level iPad’s sRGB color space. It also adds an anti-reflective screen coating for help in cutting down on glare under direct lighting.
If you spend much time outside under the sun’s rays, the iPad Mini’s screen coating is another pro it has over its slightly bigger, slightly cheaper cousin.
It also has Wi-Fi 6E, a more reliably faster Wi-Fi protocol than the iPad’s Wi-Fi 6, as well as support for the Apple Pencil Pro, which the base-level iPad doesn’t support. That alone could be a deciding factor for artists who sketch often on their iPads.
The iPad Mini also packs an Apple A17 Pro, which comes equipped with one more CPU and one more GPU core than the iPad’s A16’s five CPU cores and four GPU cores, so the diminutive iPad Mini packs faster performance than the base-level iPad.
The iPad Mini is better seen as a smaller alternative to the iPad Air M3 than the base-level iPad, as it smokes the latter.
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