Apple's New iPad Mini: OLED Screen, A20 Pro Chip, Bigger Price Tag

Apple just gave the iPad mini the one upgrade fans have wanted for years: a real screen. The company unveiled a redesigned iPad mini on October 26 with its first OLED display, a faster A20 Pro chip, and a price tag that's grown considerably since the line was last refreshed.

What actually changed

The headline feature is the display. Apple has swapped the old 8.3-inch LCD panel for an 8.5-inch OLED screen, a technology that lights each pixel individually instead of relying on a backlight shining through a layer of liquid crystal. In practice, that means deeper blacks, punchier colours, and better contrast in a device that's still thin enough to hold in one hand — Apple says the new mini measures roughly 5.4mm thick.

Under the hood sits the A20 Pro, built on a 2-nanometre manufacturing process (the smaller the number, the more transistors Apple can pack into the same sliver of silicon, which usually means more speed without burning through battery faster). Apple claims up to 4.5x faster AI performance and 2.7x faster graphics compared with the outgoing model. Storage tiers also get a quiet bump in horsepower: the 128GB and 256GB versions run a 5-core CPU, while the top 512GB model gets a 6th core. The front camera has moved to the landscape edge as a 12-megapixel Center Stage sensor, which should make video calls look normal when the tablet is propped up sideways — a small fix for an annoyance iPad owners have complained about for years. The device also picks up an IP67 rating, meaning it can survive dust and a brief dunk in water, something no previous iPad mini offered.

The price jump nobody's thrilled about

None of this comes cheap. The Wi-Fi-only model starts at $699 in the US, with the Wi-Fi plus cellular version at $849. That's a $100 increase over the price Apple was charging just four months ago, and $200 above the mini's original 2024 launch price of $499. Pre-orders open October 28, with units shipping from November 6.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman had predicted the new model would land “considerably more expensive” than before, guessing it would land close to $799 — Apple undercut that estimate slightly, but the direction of travel is unmistakable: the mini is no longer Apple's budget tablet.

A few details are still unconfirmed. Apple hasn't specified whether the new OLED panel supports ProMotion's 120Hz smooth-scrolling refresh rate, which its Pro-tier iPads use, and some early reports suggest it may stick to a standard 60Hz. Battery capacity wasn't mentioned either, which is unusual for an Apple product launch.

What it means for buyers in India

Apple hasn't announced Indian pricing yet, but history offers a rough guide. Going by how the company has priced recent launches here — its HomeView smart display, for instance, landed in India at Rs 39,900 against a $349 US price, a markup well above the straight currency conversion once customs duty and GST are added — expect the new iPad mini to comfortably cross the Rs 65,000 mark for the base Wi-Fi model once it arrives.

That matters because the iPad mini occupies an odd spot in the Indian tablet market. Android tablets from Samsung, Xiaomi, and Lenovo dominate the budget and mid-range segments that most Indian buyers shop in, while Apple's tablets sit almost entirely in the premium bracket, bought mostly by students, designers, and professionals who already live inside Apple's ecosystem. A sharper, pricier mini pushes that positioning further upmarket rather than closer to the mass market. It's also a reminder that while Apple has shifted a meaningful share of iPhone assembly to Indian factories over the past few years, iPads sold in India are still largely imported, so price hikes made in Cupertino land on Indian shelves with the extra weight of import duties attached.

• 8.5-inch OLED display, up from 8.3-inch LCD
• A20 Pro chip (2nm process), up to 4.5x faster AI tasks claimed
• IP67 water and dust resistance, a first for the mini line
• Starts at $699 (Wi-Fi) / $849 (Wi-Fi + Cellular) in the US
• Pre-orders from October 28, on sale November 6

For Indian buyers who've held onto an older mini specifically because it was the cheapest way into an iPad, this launch is a nudge to look elsewhere, at least for now. The mini is becoming a smaller iPad Air in most ways that matter, including the bill.