channelnews : Twice As Fast And Double The Storage: Apple's New ...

Apple has launched its new iPad mini in Australia, and for your $799 (128GB entry level) you’ll get a piece of kit charged by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence.

The iPad mini runs on iPadOS 18; is available in four finishes, including a new blue and purple; and has an 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display. 

Apple claims that when compared to the previous generation iPad mini, the A17 Pro delivers a 2x faster Neural Engine.

It has support for Apple Pencil Pro, and a 12MP wide back camera that supports Smart HDR 4 and uses machine learning to detect and scan documents in the Camera app.

All-day battery life is promised, and the entry level 128GB is double the storage of the previous generation. Apple says users will get the full iPad experience on the more modestly proportioned device.

The A17 Pro has a number of improvements over A15 Bionic in the previous generation iPad mini, Apple says.

“With a 6-core CPU — two performance cores and four efficiency cores — A17 Pro delivers a 30 percent boost in CPU performance. A17 Pro also brings a boost in graphics performance with a 5-core GPU, delivering a 25 percent jump over the previous generation.”

For gamers and designers, the new mini has hardware-accelerated ray tracing and support for Dynamic Caching and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. Apple says this makes it faster to create content in Affinity Designer, and means it can handle “graphics-intensive AAA games like Zenless Zone Zero”.

In Photos, the Memories feature now enables users to create movies by typing a description, and with the new Clean Up tool, Apple says they can identify and remove distracting objects in the background of a photo.

Siri has a new design with a glowing light that wraps around the edge of the screen when active on iPad. 

“With richer language-understanding capabilities, communicating with Siri is more natural and flexible,” the manufacturer says. “Siri can follow along when users stumble over their words, can maintain context from one request to the next, and now, users can type to Siri.”

The new iPad mini supports Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi + Cellular models with 5G allow users to access their files, communicate with others and back up their data.

Cellular models are activated with eSIM, “a more secure alternative to a physical SIM card, allowing users to quickly connect and transfer their existing plans digitally, and store multiple cellular plans on a single device”.

Apple Pencil Pro, an accessory that turns the mini into a sketchbook, can be stored through a new magnetic interface. The pencil is currently on sale at JB Hi-Fi for $167 (down from $219).

Customers can pre-order the new iPad mini today, and it will be available from next Wednesday, October 23.