Apple unveiled the iPad mini 7 earlier this week, giving its smallest tablet the performance bump needed to support Apple Intelligence. That’s the iPad mini 7’s biggest upgrade. The tablet is otherwise identical to its predecessor.
Apple didn’t go with one of the A18 chip flavors in the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, choosing last year’s A17 Pro, which powered the iPhone 15 Pro models. The A18 and A17 Pro chips also come with 8GB of RAM, which is a minimum requirement for Apple Intelligence.
Best of all, Apple made it happen for $499. The iPad mini 7 price matches its predecessor’s despite the big performance bump. I believe that’s a strong indication the iPhone SE 4 will have a great starting price, even though the phone should pack the newer A18 chip.
It turns out the iPad mini 7 doesn’t have exactly the same A17 Pro chip as the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. Apple is using versions of the chip that were not good enough for last year’s Pro phones. But that shouldn’t impact performance too much.
The iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro features a 6-core CPU, 6-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 8GB of RAM.
The A17 Pro version of the iPad mini 7 is almost identical. The only difference concerns the GPU. We’re looking at a 5-core GPU compared to the iPhone 15 Pro. That information is visible on Apple’s website. You only need to check the products’ specs pages or use Apple’s comparison tools.
As 9to5Mac points out, we’re looking at chip binning. Some chips fail to meet the specified requirements during the quality control process step of manufacturing. Rather than scraping those chips, Apple is giving them a second life in other products. This happened with other versions of the A-series chips in the past.
Back to the iPad mini 7, its A17 Pro chip will surely match the performance of the iPhone 15 Pro when it comes to the CPU. The GPU might take a small performance hit, but I wouldn’t expect it to be too significant. You’ll still be able to run more resource-intensive apps and games on the tablet.
About a year ago, when we were expecting the iPad mini 7 to drop, I said the iPad mini 7 would become Apple’s most powerful tablet if it were to get the A17 Pro chip. This was several months before the M4 iPad Pro release.
At the time, the A17 Pro benchmarks showed the chip could outperform the M1 and M2 chips in single-core CPU tests. Apple had used these chips or the iPad Air 5 and iPad Pro generations that preceded the M4 variant.
A year later, the new iPad mini 7 will probably be the second most powerful tablet in Apple’s lineup after the M4 iPad Pro.
