Apple Announces All-New iPad Mini: Full-Screen Design, A15 Chip, 5G, And More

At its "California Streaming" event, Apple announced an all-new redesigned iPad mini, which comes in a larger 8.3-inch Liquid Ret...

At its "California Streaming" event, Apple announced an all-new redesigned iPad mini, which comes in a larger 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display, as well as four new stunning finishes, a powerful A15 Bionic chip, a new USB-C port, a Touch ID sensor on the power button, and 5G.

“With its ultra-portable design and wide range of uses from everyday tasks to creative and enterprise applications, there’s nothing else like iPad mini,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With a new all-screen Liquid Retina display, massive boost in performance, new advanced cameras on the front and back, Center Stage, USB-C, 5G, and support for Apple Pencil, the new iPad mini is a huge leap forward that can be held in the palm of your hand.”

The new iPad mini features a larger 8.3-inch display. which features wide color, an anti-reflective coating, 500 nits of brightness, and True Tone. And new landscape stereo speakers, combined with the new display, deliver a great movie-viewing experience. There is also the Touch ID sensor that's now located on the top button of the iPad mini.

In terms of performance, the new iPad mini gets a huge boost from the new A15 Bionic chip, delivers a 40 percent jump in performance and an 80 percent in graphics performance compared to the previous generation of the iPad mini. The A15 chip also features a 16-core Neural Engine and new ML accelerators in the CPU, delivering 2x faster ML tasks than its predecessor. 

Center Stage, a feature that uses machine learning to adjust the front-facing Ultra-Wide camera during FaceTime video calls, comes to the iPad mini thanks to an updated Ultra Wide front camera with a new 12MP sensor and a much larger field of view. Meanwhile, the back camera now features a 12MP sensor with Focus Pixels and a larger aperture to capture sharp, vivid photos, and True Tone flashes for better low-light photography.

Other new features include 5G that allows iPad mini to reach peak speeds of up to 3.5Gbps in ideal conditions, Wi-Fi 6 for even faster Wi-Fi connections, a USB-C port for up to 5Gbps data transfer, and support for Apple Pencil (2nd generation).