The iPad Mini 7th-gen is built for Apple Intelligence, but it’s still a better realization of Apple’s tablets for most users.

The iPad mini (2024) is set to launch this week. The first reviews for the newest iPad are being published. There's a lot of good — and some bad.

If you’ve got your eye on the new iPad mini that just arrived, you might not have noticed that it adds support for the new Apple Pencil Pro (and removes support for the 2nd-gen model. But we have good news—the Apple Pencil Pro is available for $90 at Amazon, its best price yet, and a 30 percent discount from its $129 MSRP.

The most important thing about the new iPad mini is that, on the one hand, it’s a pretty minimal update. It got a better processor—the A17 Pro from last year’s Pro iPhones—and Apple supposedly fixed a display refresh problem that previously caused what is known as “jellyscrolling” where one side of the display refreshes slower than the other.

We marked October 22 on the calendar and canceled our appointments. We were almost certain that Apple would hold its second fall keynote on that day and unveil new Macs and iPads. But then, just when we were expecting an invitation, Cupertino sent us instead a press release with details of the 7th-gen iPad mini… and nothing else.

The last mini arrived in 2021 and it was the first smaller iPad to be an all-screen device, meaning it took the Touch ID home button from the front of the tablet and mounted it in the power button on the edge.

Apple's new iPad mini, featuring the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence support, offers an affordable entry point to experience Apple's AI features.