I have to admit that I have always loved the iPad Mini. I’ve had several; I bought them as gifts for several family members. I want a tablet that I can use to read in bed, throw in my overcrowded carry-on, or prop up on the toaster to help me cook. It’s the Mini.

All of Apple’s other tablets, from the $349 base model to the performance monster that is the M4 Pro, are about the same thing: versatility. They are large sheets of glass that you can make anything from, as long as you have the right app or attachment. The Mini, on the other hand, with its 8.3-inch screen, is closer in size to an iPhone than to any other iPad. It is mainly designed as a device that you can take anywhere and that is not your phone. The larger iPads are increasingly competing with your laptop; the Mini still complements it greatly.

The Mini has always felt like an afterthought – only occasionally updated, forced to run apps and an operating system clearly designed for larger screens – but the one-handed iPad was still the right choice for me.

This Mini, I think, represents a new low for the product. It feels like an iPad designed by a supply chain, and not by someone who actually wants you to like the product. It’s a bunch of new and not-so-new parts squeezed together, with no new specs or features to really set it apart – other than a lot of grand promises about how Apple Intelligence is going to change everything, and you absolutely will. need a device running Apple Intelligence. As far as I know, that’s the entire field. Want Apple Intelligence? Do you want the small iPad? Buy this. You have no choice.

Apple Intelligence does not exist yet. Something called Apple Intelligence ships next week, but that’s just the first glimpse of Apple’s big promise to reinvent the way you use your devices. The entire product is months or years away. Until and unless Apple Intelligence becomes groundbreakingly incredible, there are few good reasons to buy the new iPad Mini instead of the old one.

It is of course a great tablet, as all iPads have been for years. If you want an iPad Mini, buy this! It’s a good iPad Mini, and also your only official choice. But there’s not much that will make you want to upgrade from the 2021 model or even the one before it. For reading and watching movies, my 2018 Mini is still holding up just fine.

The only reason to buy this iPad Mini is because it is the iPad Mini. There is little else to do. You could spend $100 more and get a much better tablet in the M2 Air, or you could save some money and find an older or refurbished 2021 Mini. This Mini is perhaps the worst in the iPad range at $499.

There are three really new things about this Mini. The first is that it supports the Apple Pencil Pro, which magnets to the side of the Mini to charge and connect. The Mini can do all the Pencil Pro things that other iPads can do: all the hovering, pinching, and barrel rolling works great, and if you’re a mini artist, this might be worth the upgrade in itself. If you have an older Pencil that plugs into the USB port, that works too, but the Mini doesn’t support the Pencil 2 for some baffling reason.

The second change is the colours: the Mini comes in the signature space gray and pale gold ‘starlight’, plus a new blue and purple. Mine is blue and the color is so faint that I had to check to make sure I didn’t just have a silver model. (There’s no silver model.) Next to my blue iPhone 16, it looks pitifully pale.

Best of all, you get more storage space for the price! That’s definitely a win. The base model of the Mini now comes with 128GB of storage, which is good and long overdue; $499 for a tablet with 64GB of storage is just plain stupid.

This new Mini is essentially an internal upgrade from the last model, which is a bit of a shame. On all other iPad models, the front camera has been moved to the center of the landscape side of the device; on the Mini it’s still stubbornly in portrait mode, even though the kickstand on the official Smart Folio case supports it in landscape mode. The ‘jelly scrolling’ effect of the last model is still very much present. The Mini also still uses Touch ID in the power button. Face ID is so much better and faster, especially on a device where the power button is constantly rotating in your hands, that tapping my index finger again feels like a huge step backwards.

The main new spec is the Apple A17 Pro chip, the same one you’d find in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Well, not exactly the same: the 15 Pro’s chip has six CPU cores and six GPU cores, but the Mini has six CPU and five GPU. This has led some smart people to conclude that these are so-called ‘binned’ chips, meaning that they have come out of the production process and for whatever reason are unable to achieve maximum performance. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.) It’s a normal exercise, but it does indicate that you’re not getting the best of the best – or even the best of the best from last year.

In my tests, the Mini is about 30 percent faster than the old Mini in both CPU and GPU performance (which matches Apple’s marketing) and scores slightly lower across the board than the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. The M4-powered iPad Pro blows it out of the water on every front, and the M2-powered Air also beats the Mini badly on every front except single-core CPU performance. (Which is totally trackable for boring chip design reasons, but it doesn’t really matter in everyday use.) Even the M1 iPad Air, which came out in 2022, outperforms the Mini in most benchmark tests.

When I push the Mini, I notice its limits. It could handle Call of Duty: Warzone even on high settings, with only the occasional dropped frame, but as soon as I cranked things up Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it stuttered so much that the game became difficult to play. The game even drops frames on medium settings. In Madden NFL Mobile, Real Racing 3, and of course the A17 Pro held up well in every casual game I tried. I doubt most people are looking for one Mirage machine, think of a Mini, so rest assured, this will happen Word fine. The battery is also holding up well: I killed it after about 8.5 hours of reading and streaming Community on Peacock, and playing various games. That’s about in line with my normal iPad experience.

With more daily use, the new Mini feels a bit faster than the previous model. Apps open a quarter of a second faster, iMovie is displayed slightly faster and image edits feel slightly more immediate. The M2 Air feels another turn faster and the M4 Pro perhaps half a turn further. The M4 is far in reducing the return area for most things, and you would really only notice the difference between the two side by side. They are all very fast.

But it still matters that the Mini has relatively little power. My advice with iPads (and most gadgets) has long been to buy the most powerful thing you can afford and plan to use it forever. And if Apple Intelligence really wants to be good and important, you’re going to need all the horsepower you can get. This new Mini is probably the least powerful device that can run Apple Intelligence. (The base iPad, which is decidedly less powerful than the Mini, is the only iPad Apple sells that doesn’t support this feature.)

That’s a particularly big deal for the Mini, because if you buy it now, it’s completely a gamble that Apple Intelligence will be worth the upgrade immediately. Would you bet that Apple’s AI, which hasn’t been released yet and won’t be released until next spring in total and probably well beyond, will be undeniably great before the next Mini is coming out? I certainly wouldn’t do that. Apple has some good ideas about what Siri can do for you and how AI can make it easier for you to solve math problems or write emails, but many of those features are still new and imperfect, and many others do that simply isn’t. t exists.

And wait a minute: if you do a lot of handwritten math or write a ton of emails, you’d probably prefer a bigger screen or a keyboard attachment, right? The new Mini ostensibly exists for a user who wants the absolute best pen experience, a million new AI-powered productivity tools, And the absolute smallest screen that offers both, regardless of the tradeoffs. That’s a pretty tight Venn diagram, if you ask me.

There are so many other interesting things Apple could do with the Mini. It could give iPhone Pro Max imaging and a camera control button this the device Hollywood hopes to use to make movies. (I’m vehemently against people taking photos in public with iPads, but the Mini is small enough that you can get away with it—and a big viewfinder like that would be great.) Apple could make a charging dock that would hold a music or smart house makes controller a la the Pixel Tablet. It could build a Backbone-style controller and turn it into a portable console. Instead, all you get is the same flimsy case, which is overpriced and constantly comes loose from the back of my device.

The whole story for the new Mini, aside from the fact that it’s the iPad Mini, is that it’s the smallest iPad made for Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence better be a great upgrade, because without it the new Mini isn’t a real upgrade at all.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge