The new iPad mini costs $699, and commenters remember when it was the cheap one
Apple's iPad mini gets a 2nm A20 Pro chip, an OLED screen and IP67 water resistance. Pre-orders open Wednesday, devices ship November 6.
The 8.5-inch iPad mini starts at $699 for 128GB, with an OLED display peaking at 1,200 nits and a chip Apple says is 4.5x faster at AI work.
A Canadian commenter put the arithmetic plainly: a 32GB mini cost $379 in 2015, and a 128GB one is $949 today.
What Apple shipped
Apple's announcement lists an A20 Pro chip on a 2-nanometer process, with a 7-core GPU that has Neural Accelerators in each core. Claims: up to 4.5x faster AI than the previous generation, 2.7x faster graphics and 60% faster multithreaded CPU. The screen is an 8.5-inch OLED with 1,200 nits peak brightness and a nano-texture option. It is 5.4 mm thick, IP67 rated, and has a Wi-Fi 7 N1 chip and a C2 cellular modem. It ships with iPadOS 27 and Siri AI in beta.
Wi-Fi models start at $699 (128GB, with 256GB and 512GB above), cellular at $849, education at $649. Smart Folio is $79, Apple Pencil Pro $129. Pre-orders open October 28; deliveries start November 6.
The "mini" that stopped being the budget iPad
"Last iPad Mini I bought in 2015 was 32gb for $379CAD, one today 11 years later is $949CAD for 128gb, 2.5x over 10 years" — a commenter who bought the 2015 mini
Another tied it to the supply chain:
"The reality: RAM/Chip prices are way, way up. The starter iPad mini is $700." — a commenter
The specs list got a quick audit. One commenter wrote that the release has no mention of the refresh rate and searched it for ProMotion:
"Ctrl+F "ProMotion" 0 results non-starter" — a commenter
The OLED repair question
"Her mom's cats chewed on the corner of the screen. It won't turn on. The cost to replace that screen: $1200." — an O'Reilly author who bought a used M4 iPad for his daughter
His conclusion was that OLED panels fail entirely when a pixel is damaged, a claim he stated without a source. The cost to fix a damaged OLED iPad is the figure to price in next to the $699 sticker.
Where the size has gone
A commenter who calls himself a former startup founder traced the sizes: the original iPad was 9.7 inches, today's smallest regular iPad is 11, and the mini has moved from 7.9 to 8.5 inches, narrowing the gap to the foldable iPhone's inner display.
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