Apple iPad mini 7 review: Don't let its size fool you

More storage and Pencil Pro support make it a versatile portable tool

The seventh-generation iPad mini, which comes with the A17 Pro chip, supports the Apple Pencil Pro. Photo: Apple

Much like the latest iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, Apple has never been afraid to blur the lines between its products. Their latest tablet is no exception, to a certain extent.

The tech giant's seventh-generation iPad mini – officially the iPad mini (A17 Pro), but we're calling it iPad mini 7 for simplicity's sake – continues a budget-friendly yet powerful small device that has carved its own niche among its bigger, flashier counterparts, and amid a tablet market Apple is dominating.

It's been a little more than three years since we got our hands on a new iPad mini – that's the second-longest idle time for the mini since the gap between the fourth and fifth generations – so let's see what it has to offer.

Form: Just a new hue of blue

We're going to be upfront here: aesthetically, there's no difference between the iPad mini 7 and its predecessor that was launched in 2021. The only major addition is a new colour, blue, which supplants pink and joins purple, space grey and starlight as your options.

The bezel width remains the same, roughly 9mm according to our trusty tape measure. That's practically the same as the bigger iPads but it's much more noticeable on the mini relative to its size.

This begs the question: if Apple can make iPhones with incredibly thin bezels, why not do it for the iPad? We think this is long overdue and would give the iPad mini an even sleeker look (ditto for the bigger iPads) to complement its portability.

The usual buttons are in their place: on its default portrait position, the volume buttons are on the top-left corner and the power button, which also houses Touch ID, is on the top-right (Apple removed the home button and shifted the volume buttons on the sixth-generation iPad mini).

The display remains at about 21cm and still uses a liquid retina display, though it's rumoured that an OLED iPad mini will come out in 2026. Its single-lens camera is still at 12MP and, again, supports only eSIMs.

It also does not have NFC – which means you can't use Apple Pay – nor does it have MagSafe compatibility. We know wireless charging is super-slow but it would've been a welcome alternative.

What's inside?

Powering the new iPad mini is the A17 Pro chip, which was used in last year's iPhone 15 Pros. So it's fair to ask why they didn't use the A18, which would've streamlined their new product line-ups considering the new iPhone 16 devices use the same latest processor.

We're guessing Apple is saving the A18 for a refresh of the bigger iPads, which begs another question: why only a new iPad mini right now? It would've been great if an 11th-generation standard iPad was also launched, since the latest Air and Pro were released only in May.

Apple says the A17 Pro gives a 30 per cent and 25 per cent boost in CPU and GPU performance, respectively, which comes in handy to optimise and maximise battery life.

And, in an absolute blast of a move, the new iPad mini now comes in a 512GB variant – no longer will you be stuck with very limited storage on such a device (don't forget about iCloud, of course).

How long does it last?

Which directly brings us to battery life. Apple says the new iPad mini can last up to 10 hours, which has been the ceiling since the very first iPad mini in 2012 – and practically across the entire iPad range.

In our one-hour YouTube-at-full-brightness test, the device lost 15 per cent, which is middling compared to our reviews of the 10th-generation iPad and M2 iPad Pro. Mixed along with other activities, you're good to last a day.

As for charging – using the in-the-box 20W power brick – the iPad mini 7 barely hit 50 per cent in an hour and took a little more than two hours to fully charge – and that's while letting it sit idle.

We're genuinely surprised that a charging brick is still included in iPads, considering Apple has stopped including them since 2020s iPhone 12. We expect them to be gone sooner or later because of Apple's sustainability commitment and the positive reception garnered by that move from environmentalists.

New Apple Intelligence and Pencil tricks

We've already discussed Apple Intelligence a number of times and we'll be able to finally play with it when it comes out with the iPadOS 18.1 update next week.

But for a little refresher, here we go: the iPadOS 18.1 update is expected to include Writing Tools (summarising, proofreading content), Clean Up, Memory movie creation and natural language search in Photos, notification summaries, Reduce Interruptions Focus (which prioritises notifications), message priorities in Mail, Smart Reply and Summaries in Mail and Messages, and an overhaul of Siri that makes it more accurate.

And what's an iPad without its trusty Apple Pencil? For starters, the iPad mini 7 supports the budget-friendly USB-C Pencil and the top-end Pencil Pro, which brings more versatility to users.

But aside from the artistry and doodling we're all familiar with, we're more interested in the more complex things it can accomplish, starting with Math Notes: basically, it allows you to write, with the Pencil, maths problems on the calculator app, then watch iPadOS 18 solve it.

The most interesting thing about it is how it handles variables: in an algebraic equation, if you change up some letters, iPadOS 18 will quickly rework the results and even generate and insert the corresponding graphs. It can even mix different units like, for example, adding figures in inches and metres.

Math Notes is seen on the Apple iPad mini with the A17 Pro chip. Photo: Apple

Pretty impressive, though there have been samples on the web in which the results weren't correct.

There's a lot more to digest about Apple Intelligence. And it won't be long until we can fully experience the much-hyped AI platform.

Verdict

The Apple iPad mini (A17 Pro) presents a compelling choice: with support for the Pencil Pro and a really generous 512GB ceiling storage, it's a clear indication that the smallest iPad is becoming a really big deal.

You still don't get higher-tier storage, display and cameras, but that gets evened out by the device being a handy and very portable machine that packs in the power of Apple's offerings.

And to top it all off, it's more affordable – starting prices for the Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi-plus-cellular models are Dh2,099 and Dh2,699, respectively, which are both Dh30 cheaper than their predecessors.