Apple isn't waiting for its "Pro and Tell" event to unveil new hardware. On Monday morning, the company announced the 2026 iPad mini. The new tablet has 8.5-inch OLED display, which Apple will allow customers to spec with its nano-texture coating.
On paper, the new panel is a substantial upgrade. According to Apple, it's capable of reaching a peak brightness of 1,200 nits, or twice as bright as the 2024 iPad mini. It can also sustain 600 nits of full-screen brightness across both SDR and HDR content. Additionally, it offers a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio. Thanks to 24 percent thinner bezels, the new screen is also slightly larger than the 8.3-inch display the iPad mini previously offered.
In addition to a new OLED panel, the 2026 iPad mini has Apple's first-ever "Acoustic Display." The company has embedded a set of custom woofers "through the display," which it says results in those components delivering "punchier" bass and more volume. Similarly, the tablet's tweeters are now hidden between the glass of its touchscreen and aluminum enclosure, allowing them to produce clearer high-frequency sounds. Apple has also sealed the enclosure; it's now iP67-rated against water and dust.
Inside, the iPad mini has Apple's latest A20 Pro system-on-a-chip, which debuted alongside the iPhone 18 Pro earlier this year. Here, the company is touting the chip's AI processing capabilities, saying the new tablet is perfect for running local LLMs. Realistically, I can't say I see the regular iPad mini user dying to run a local AI model on their tablet, but power to you if that gets you excited. Either way, the A20 Pro also has a faster, more powerful CPU than the one that came with the 2024's iPad mini's A17 Pro. Apple says the new CPU will translate to better performance in everyday tasks. Apple has also outfitted the iPad mini with its in-house N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread connectivity. If you plan to get a cellular model, those come with the company's C2 modem, which offers 50 percent faster data speeds than the iPad mini's previous modem.
Like all of its siblings, the new mini now offers a landscape-oriented 12-megapixel Center Stage camera for more natural-looking video calls. On the back, you get a single 12MP camera with Smart HDR 4 support and 4K video capture at 60 frames per second.
Apple will offer the iPad mini in two colors (midnight and starlight), and three storage configurations: 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. That means the new model offers twice as much storage to start as the iPad mini did previously. For the Wi-Fi only variant, pricing at $699, or $200 more than 2024 iPad mini did at launch. Pricing for the cellular model starts at $849. Pre-orders for both variants open on October 28, with general availability to follow on November 6.