Apple iPad Mini 2024 review: missing pieces

I should confess right up front that I have always loved the iPad Mini. I’ve owned several; I’ve bought them as gifts for multiple family members. I want a tablet I can use to read in bed, throw into my overstuffed carry-on bag, or prop up on the toaster to help me cook dinner. The Mini is the one.

Every other one of Apple’s tablets, from the $349 base model to the performance monster that is the M4 Pro, is about the same thing: versatility. They’re big slabs of glass that can be turned into anything, so long as you have the right app or attachment. The Mini, on the other hand, with its 8.3-inch screen, is closer in size to an iPhone than to any other iPad. It’s mostly designed to be a go-everywhere device that isn’t your phone. The bigger iPads are increasingly competing with your laptop; the Mini very much still complements it.

The Mini has always felt like an afterthought — updated only occasionally, forced to run apps and an OS clearly designed for larger screens — but the one-handed iPad was the one for me anyway.

This Mini, I think, represents a new low for the product. It feels like an iPad designed by a supply chain, not by someone who actually wants you to like the product. It’s a bunch of new and not-that-new parts smushed together, without any new specs or features to really set it apart — aside from a lot of grand promises about how Apple Intelligence is going to change everything and you’re absolutely going to need a device that runs Apple Intelligence. As far as I can tell, that’s the whole pitch. Want Apple Intelligence? Want the small iPad? Get this one. You don’t have a choice.

Apple Intelligence doesn’t exist yet. Something called Apple Intelligence is shipping next week, but that’s only the first glimmer of Apple’s big promise to reinvent the way you use your devices. The full product is months or years away. Until and unless Apple Intelligence becomes game-changingly incredible, there are few good reasons to buy the new iPad Mini instead of the old one. 

It’s a perfectly good tablet, of course, in the way that all iPads have been for years. If you want an iPad Mini, buy this one! It’s a good iPad Mini, and also your only official choice. But there’s not much here to make you want to upgrade from the 2021 model or even the one before. For reading and watching movies, my 2018-era Mini is still holding up fine.

The only reason to buy this iPad Mini is because it’s the iPad Mini. It has little else going for it. You could spend $100 more and get a much better tablet in the M2 Air, or you could save some money and find an older or refurbished 2021 Mini. This Mini, at $499, might be the worst value in the iPad lineup.

There are three genuinely new things about this Mini. The first is that it supports the Apple Pencil Pro, which magnets to the side of the Mini to charge and connect. The Mini can do all of the Pencil Pro things other iPads can — all the hovering and squeezing and barrel-rolling works just fine, and if you’re a Mini-toting artist, this might be worth the upgrade all by itself. If you have an older Pencil that sticks into the USB port, that’ll work, too, but the Mini doesn’t support the Pencil 2, for some baffling reason.

The second change is the colors: the Mini comes in the typical space gray and the pale gold “starlight,” plus a new blue and purple. Mine is blue, and the color is so faint that I had to check to make sure I didn’t actually just have a silver model. (There is no silver model.) Next to my blue iPhone 16, it looks woefully pale.

Best of all, you get more storage for the price! That’s a win for sure. The Mini’s base model now comes with 128GB of storage, which is good and long overdue; $499 for a tablet with 64GB of storage is just silly.

This new Mini is basically a rip-and-replace internal upgrade of the last model, which is a bit of a bummer. All of the other iPad models have moved the front-facing camera to the center of the landscape side of the device; on the Mini, it’s still stubbornly in portrait, even though the kickstand on the official Smart Folio case props it up in landscape mode. The “jelly scrolling” effect from the last model is still very much present. The Mini also still uses Touch ID in the power button. Face ID is so much better and faster, especially on a device whose power button is constantly rotating in your hands, that going back to tapping my index finger felt like a huge step backward.

The most important new spec is the Apple A17 Pro chip, the same one you’d find in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Well, not exactly the same one: the 15 Pro’s chip has six CPU cores and six GPU cores, but the Mini has six CPU and five GPU. This has led some smart people to conclude that these are so-called “binned” chips, which means they came out of the manufacturing process unable to reach maximum performance for whatever reason. (Here’s a good explainer of how it all works.) It’s a normal enough practice, but it does indicate that you’re not getting the best of the best — or even the best of last year’s best.

In my tests, the Mini is around 30 percent faster than the old Mini both in CPU and GPU performance (which matches Apple’s marketing) and scores slightly lower across the board than the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. The M4-powered iPad Pro blows it out of the water on every front, and the M2-powered Air also beats the Mini badly on every score but single-core CPU performance. (Which totally tracks for boring chip design reasons, but it doesn’t really matter in everyday use.) Even the M1 iPad Air, which came out in 2022, bests the Mini in most benchmark tests.

When I push the Mini, I do notice its limits. It was able to handle Call of Duty: Warzone even on high settings, with only the occasional dropped frame, but as soon as I cranked things up in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it stuttered so badly that the game became hard to play. The game even drops frames on medium settings. In Madden NFL Mobile, Real Racing 3, and obviously any casual game I tried, the A17 Pro held up nicely. I doubt most people looking for a Mirage machine are thinking about a Mini anyway, so rest assured, this’ll Wordle just fine. The battery holds up okay, too: I killed it in about 8.5 hours of reading, streaming Community on Peacock, and playing various games. That roughly tracks with my normal iPad experience.

In more everyday use, the new Mini feels one beat faster than the last model. Apps open a quarter-second quicker, iMovie renders slightly quicker, and image edits feel just a smidge more immediate. The M2 Air feels another beat faster and the M4 Pro maybe another half-beat beyond that. The M4 is well into diminishing returns territory for most things, and you’d really only notice the difference between any of them side by side. They’re all very fast.

But it still matters that the Mini is relatively underpowered. My advice with iPads (and most gadgets) has long been to buy the most powerful thing you can afford and plan to use it forever. And if Apple Intelligence really is going to be good and important, you’re going to need all the horsepower you can get. This new Mini probably is the single least powerful device that can run Apple Intelligence. (The base iPad, which is definitely less powerful than the Mini, is the only iPad Apple sells that doesn’t support the feature.)

That’s a particularly big problem for the Mini because to buy this one now is entirely a bet that Apple Intelligence is going to be immediately worth the upgrade. Would you wager that Apple’s AI, which hasn’t shipped yet and won’t ship in total until at least next spring and probably well after, will be unmissably great before the next Mini comes out? I certainly wouldn’t. Apple has some good ideas about what Siri can do on your behalf and how AI might make it easier for you to do math problems or write emails, but many of those features are still new and imperfect, and many others just straight-up don’t exist.

And wait, hang on: if you’re doing a lot of handwritten math or writing a ton of emails, you’d likely rather have a bigger screen or a keyboard attachment, wouldn’t you? The new Mini ostensibly exists for a user who wants the absolute best pen experience, a million new AI-enabled productivity tools, and the absolute smallest screen that gives them both, no matter the tradeoffs. That’s a pretty tight Venn diagram, if you ask me.

There are so many other interesting things Apple could do with the Mini. It could give it iPhone Pro Max-level imaging and a Camera Control button and make this the device it hopes Hollywood will use to make movies. (I am vehemently against people taking photos in public with iPads, but the Mini is small enough to get away with it — and a viewfinder this big would be amazing.) Apple could make a charging dock that turns it into a music or smart home controller a la the Pixel Tablet. It could build a Backbone-style controller and make it a handheld console. Instead, all you get is the same flimsy cover, which is too expensive and constantly coming unstuck from the back of my device. 

The whole pitch for the new Mini, aside from the fact that it’s the iPad Mini, is that it’s the smallest iPad made for Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence better be a hell of an upgrade because, without it, the new Mini isn’t much of an upgrade at all.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge