Apple isn't waiting for its "Pro and Tell" event to unveil new hardware. On Monday morning, the company announced the 2026 iPad mini. The new tablet has 8.5-inch OLED display, which Apple will allow customers to spec with its nano-texture coating.
On paper, the new panel is a substantial upgrade. According to Apple, it's capable of reaching a peak brightness of 1,200 nits, or twice as bright as the 2024 iPad mini. It can also sustain 600 nits of full-screen brightness across both SDR and HDR content. Additionally, it offers a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio. Thanks to 24 percent thinner bezels, the new screen is also slightly larger than the 8.3-inch display the iPad mini previously offered.
In addition to a new OLED panel, the 2026 iPad mini has Apple's first-ever "Acoustic Display." The company has embedded a set of custom woofers "through the display," which it says results in those components delivering "punchier" bass and more volume. Similarly, the tablet's tweeters are now hidden between the glass of its touchscreen and aluminum enclosure, allowing them to produce clearer high-frequency sounds. Apple has also sealed the enclosure; it's now iP67-rated against water and dust.
Inside, the iPad mini has Apple's latest A20 Pro system-on-a-chip, which debuted alongside the iPhone 18 Pro earlier this year. Here, the company is touting the chip's AI processing capabilities, saying the new tablet is perfect for running local LLMs. Realistically, I can't say I see the regular iPad mini user dying to run a local AI model on their tablet, but power to you if that gets you excited.
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