iPad Mini 7 Review: Mini Tablet, Mini Upgrades

Three years since the launch of the 6th generation iPad mini, Apple has finally updated the smallest tablet in its arsenal. Okay, so calling it “updated” might be an overstatement — this is pretty much the same iPad, but with minor improvements for the sake of supporting Apple Intelligence. Well, I spent the last fortnight with the iPad mini 7, using it for work-related tasks, and some not-so-work-related tasks alike, and playing with AI on the side. And well, I have some thoughts.

So, if you’re wondering whether you should buy the brand-new-Apple-Intelligence-supporting-iPad-mini, here is my review of the iPad mini 7 — who is it for, and who should avoid it like the plague.

iPad mini 7 Specifications

In Terms of Changes, We Have No Changes…

Apple hasn’t changed anything on the design front with the iPad mini 7. That’s not a bad thing, however, since the tablet looks and feels basically like a miniaturized iPad Air or Pro. And as the saying goes “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke,” Apple’s decision to keep the same design isn’t one that I disagree with.

Well, not entirely. See, the iPad mini 7 comes with its 12MP front facing camera placed in the portrait orientation, on the top bezel of the tablet. That’s a placement which works perfectly on smartphones, but not one that goes very well on a tablet.

The iPad Air and the iPad Pro, both have their front facing cameras on the side bezel, which is a more natural placement since this is a device that will be used in the landscape orientation a lot more than any smartphone would.

I could have cut Apple some slack on this. After all, a small tablet like the mini, might be used a lot more in the portrait orientation. However, Apple’s own cases for the iPad mini 7 all make it rest in a landscape orientation, which ends up rendering this entire argument moot.

Further, just as it was with the 6th-gen iPad mini, the 7th-gen iPad mini also features Center Stage, to keep you in the center of the frame during video calls, and once again, having your camera off to the side during a FaceTime call pretty much negates any advantage of staying centered in the frame.

Take a look at the image below — I am looking at the screen in both cases, but the iPad Pro, with its front camera on the side bezel results in my face being in a much better position, than the iPad mini 7 with its camera on the top bezel.

I don’t begrudge Apple the Touch ID placement in the power button, and I am happy that the USB-C port now supports data transfers upto 10Gbps as compared to 5Gbps on the 6th-gen iPad mini. And overall, I do like the design here, it’s small and portable, and that in itself is enough of a reason for many people to buy an iPad mini.

The display remains the same here as well. It’s still an 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display with a pixel density of 326 ppi. It has the same 500 nits of brightness, the P3 color gamut, and all the bells and whistles as its now-outdated brother. The thing that’s changed here, is that the iPad mini now supports Apple Pencil Pro alongside the regular USB-C Apple Pencil.

There’s no support for the 2nd gen Apple Pencil, which is ridiculous since the iPad mini 6 supported it, and a number of mini users will now be left with an Apple Pencil that’s nothing more than a glorified, generic stylus — worse, in fact, since it probably just won’t work even as a stylus.

Another thing that’s ridiculous is that it’s still a 60Hz display — and believe me, you can notice the difference if you’ve used a 120Hz display on an iPhone or the iPad Pro. If you haven’t used a 120Hz display, you’re probably not even gonna notice anything.

Other than the lack of 120Hz in a device that starts at $499, the display on the iPad mini 7 is pretty good. It’s bright enough, and at 326ppi, it’s actually more pixel-dense than the M4 iPad Pro (264ppi), even though the resolution stands at 2266×1488 here.

I have spent plenty of time looking at this screen over the past couple of days, you know, gaming, browsing, watching movies and videos, and even reading some books on the Kindle app, and the display is absolutely gorgeous. Plus, thanks to its tiny (for a tablet) size, it’s actually a lot of fun using this tablet to read books at night, or to watch your favorite Netflix shows handheld.

Look, the iPad mini 7 doesn’t really change anything on the display front when compared to the iPad mini 6, and that’s a bit disappointing, but I can at least tell why this is the case. The iPad Air still doesn’t have a high refresh rate screen — in fact, there are rumors that Apple is working on a 90Hz display for the Air. That obviously means the mini 7 couldn’t get a 120Hz display either, or the iPad Air would become the laughing stock of the iPad lineup.

So yeah, the iPad mini’s display is unfortunately, exactly the same as the one you got in 2021… I don’t know how to feel about this, because this is an upgrade that comes in after 3 years, and it just feels… too less.

Multimedia Experience

One of the main use-cases for an iPad, even a mini one, is consuming content, and if you’re looking for a portable multimedia device, the iPad mini 7 is definitely a good choice.

The size itself makes it easy to carry around, and even hold up without tiring out your arms too much. Plus, the display is gorgeous, and when you’re watching movies or TV shows, or reading books, the 60Hz display doesn’t matter at all anyway. All 326ppi of the screen works perfectly to ensure you can enjoy your shows.

Plus, the iPad mini 7 also gets landscape stereo speakers — not new, since the iPad mini 6 also had this set up — and these speakers really do make a big impact in the sound output and quality. Watching movies on the new 2024 iPad mini is an experience I thoroughly enjoyed.

Finally, Some Upgrades!

Performance is the place where the iPad mini 7 gets the upgrades — an A17 Pro processor from the iPhone 15 Pro series, and more RAM (in order to support Apple Intelligence) make the iPad mini 7 a pretty powerful tablet. In fact, benchmark scores are pretty good here.

In real world performance, the iPad mini 7 doesn’t leave much to be desired either. It lands smack dab in the middle of the iPad and the iPad Air, and much below the iPad Pro — all things that you’d expect from the mini.

If you’re exporting videos in Final Cut Pro, they’ll export fast enough, and if you’re playing games, you will get good frame rates and an overall nice experience. There’s really nothing to complain about when it comes to the performance.

It’s an iPad, and it does iPad things very well. I can’t put it any better than that. You’re not going to be using this for Pro-level workflows, but it really can do those things for the most part.

Believe me, I tried most things that I would do on an iPad Pro on this tablet as well, and I really can’t complain about the experience or the performance — the iPad mini 7 can easily handle most tasks that you’d find yourself doing, and that’s thanks to the A17 Pro which is a really powerful chip in its own right.

“AI For the Rest of Us” is Still Not Here Completely

Normally, I wouldn’t include this part in a review since Apple Intelligence isn’t here for everyone yet, and it’s simply a promise you’ll likely only get to experience sometime in December. Unless you install the Beta, which incidentally, I would not recommend you do on your new iPad. Sure, you do get some new features such as the updated Siri animations with iPadOS 18.1, but most of the coolest stuff, including Image Playground and Genmoji will only come along with iPadOS 18.2, which should be here sometime in December.

However, since the upgrades to the iPad mini 7 are purely aimed at making it compatible with Apple Intelligence, it only makes sense to give you an idea of what it’s like on this device.

First, there’s a waitlist. So you get Apple Intelligence, and then you sign up for a waitlist to get the upgraded Siri and the Genmoji + Image Playground features. This waitlist, by the way, can be a pain. In our case, I got access to the new Siri within minutes of requesting access. However, getting access to Image Playground and Genmoji took over a week — your mileage may vary.

Once you do get access however, Apple Intelligence features are fairly fun. The new Siri experience, along with ChatGPT integration, makes it more useful than it used to be, although I still don’t find myself asking Siri for much more than setting alarms and reminders. But if you are a Siri power user, this might make a big difference to you.

Image Playground and Genmoji are fun to play around with, but right now, they feel more like novelty features. We’ve seen this happen with DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and every other AI image generation app out there. Unless you have a real use-case for a tool like this, it’s simply a party trick, and one that you’d use for a couple of days, make a few emojis and laugh about them, and then never use again.

To be fair, Genmoji is good, and the quality of emojis is really good as well. Plus, it creates some truly hilarious things if prompted properly, and if you’ve ever wanted to send someone a heart that had a smiley face and a corn-like texture, Genmoji has got your back (although I must warn you, it’s weirdly disconcerting to look at it).

Plus, you get a ton of other Apple Intelligence features to play around with. There are Writing Tools to help you with writing, Clean Up in the Photos app to remove unwanted objects, and the new Reduced Interruptions Focus Mode is quite good as well. Apple Intelligence also summarizes notifications for you, which can turn out to be good or bad, and in many cases it can be absolutely bonkers.

In with the Old, In with the New! Huh?

Another thing that’s new with the iPad mini 7 is the Apple Pencil Pro support. Apple was good enough to send the Apple Pencil Pro along with the iPad mini 7, and since this is the latest edition of the Pencil, it comes with its own set of cool new features, including the Barrel Roll, which is really cool to fine-tune the way your pencil tools write on many apps, especially if you’re using things like a calligraphy pen tool.

Plus, the hover feature also makes it easy to see exactly how your various tools are oriented, and exactly where your pencil is about to write once you start writing in various note taking apps for iPad.

There’s also support for the regular USB-C Apple Pencil, but as I have mentioned before, the iPad mini 7 does not support Apple Pencil 2. So, if you’re using a 2nd-gen Apple Pencil with your 6th-gen iPad mini, you will no longer be able to use it with your new tablet.

Apart from that, it’s what an Apple Pencil is supposed to be — a good tool to write, sketch, paint, or draw. It charges magnetically, and it won’t let you swipe up on the home bar to go to the home screen… I don’t know why that is, but it’s just a thing you learn to live with.

Ah, the Cameras!

Full disclosure — I’m not one to take pictures with an iPad, even one that’s as close to a smartphone’s size as the iPad mini 7 is, but if you’re so inclined, you should know that the cameras on the iPad mini are only decent.

It’s a 12MP f/1.8 unit on the back, which should, in theory, be fairly good at taking pictures, but the images are washed out here, and there’s really very little detail even in good lighting conditions. Sure, the images look fine at first glance but zoom in and the lack of detail is very evident in every single image, regardless of the lighting. The iPad mini 7 does support 4K 60 videos, and things look decent on that front, but again, it’s nothing to write home about.

The bottom line is this: hopefully you’re not considering an iPad as your primary photo-taking device, and when you do need to take a picture with an iPad for some reason, the 7th-gen Mini can get you what you need, but don’t expect too much.

The front camera is likely to be used a lot more here, thanks to the iPad mini being almost the perfect size for everyday FaceTime calls. This too is a 12MP camera, but it comes with Center Stage support to keep your face centered in the frame at all times, which comes in handy if you’re gonna be moving around a lot while on a FaceTime call.

Video quality in video calls is actually fairly nice here, and Center Stage works just as well as it always has, which is good. However, like I said before, the positioning of the front camera on the top-bezel really dulls the experience. Not only are you always looking off to the side in video calls, but the Eye Contact feature also doesn’t seem to be helping at all as you can see in the screenshot below.

Say What You Will, the iPad mini 7 Lasts Looooong!

Coming to the battery, the iPad mini 7 has the same 19.3 watt-hour battery as the older, now outdated, and long overdue for an update, 6th-gen iPad mini. Apple says that you can get 10 hours of surfing the web on WiFi or watching video, which I don’t understand.

In real world usage though, the iPad mini’s battery is remarkable to say the least. I couldn’t kill it in a day of heavy usage with a lot of videos (on YouTube and Netflix), trying to create animations in Procreate, browsing the web, and even taking long, handwritten notes on Noteful — for no reason other than to see how much battery I can drain doing this. Spoiler alert: not a lot. I even used the god-awful, unoptimized Instagram iPad app just to stress the battery even more.

By the end of it, after spending over 4 hours of my day just using the iPad mini for absolutely no other reason than to drain its battery, I could only bring it down to 55% by 7:30pm. That’s a fairly good number, especially since I’m running the iPadOS 18.2 Developer Beta on this iPad.

iPad Mini 7: Should You Buy?

So should you buy the 7th-gen iPad mini? The answer to that depends on a couple of factors. If you already have a 6th-gen iPad mini, there’s really no reason to upgrade to this new one which is basically the same, and will render your second gen Apple Pencil utterly useless.

The only reason to upgrade, would be for Apple Intelligence, and that’s something I’m not sure I can say, with confidence, is worth the $499 price tag on this device.

On the other hand, if you’re simply looking to get an iPad that’s small and powerful, the iPad mini 7 is undoubtedly the one for you. It does what an iPad is supposed to do, while being tiny and packing a punch, and that makes it a good iPad mini.