Enlarge / The new iPad Mini takes most of its cues from the iPad Air 4. (credit: Apple)

After years of stagnating in the same look and features, Apple’s iPad mini will finally get a major redesign akin to last year’s iPad Air update, the company announced today. The tablet’s screen size gets a bump from 7.9 to 8.3 inches, and includes a new A15 Bionic processor that Apple says is “up to 80% faster” than the A12 chip in the old iPad mini 4. But the redesign also comes with a price hike: the new iPad mini starts at $499 for a Wi-Fi model with 64GB of storage, $100 more than the previous model.

Like other recent iPads and iPhones, the iPad mini drops the home button to make more room on the front of the device for a larger, almost edge-to-edge screen. However, it does not feature Face ID like the iPad Pro. Rather, it follows the 2020 iPad Air in featuring a TouchID fingerprint reader on one of the power button for authentication. It also leaves behind Apple’s long-standing, proprietary Lightning port in favor of industry standard USB-C—a change that also came to other recent iPad redesigns. The flat edges of the tablet bring the new mini’s design in line with the iPad Air 4 and post-2018 iPad Pros, and also enables Apple Pencil 2 compatibility.

An overview of the new iPad mini’s features. (credit: Apple)

Internally, the A15 chip combines a six-core CPU that Apple says is 40% faster than the A12, and a 5-core GPU that’s it says is 80% faster than the A12—no word on the mix of performance vs. efficiency cores on the CPU, but the A14 includes two fast cores and four efficiency ones, and we’d expect that balance to stay the same for the A15. Both the rear and front-facing cameras get significant upgrades—the 8MP rear camera in the mini 4 is bumped up to 12MP in the new model, and the front-facing camera gets a 12MP resolution bump and support for the face-and-body-tracking “Center Stage” feature from the 2021 iPad Pros. Support for 5G and Wi-Fi 6 round out the connectivity features.