The 2026 iPad Mini is a terrific tiny tablet — for a big price

The iPad Mini sometimes feels like a trap. It is, in some ways and for some people, the perfect iPad: meaningfully larger than my phone’s screen but still small and light enough to use for reading in bed or gaming on the subway. As most of the rest of the iPad line has tilted ever closer to laptop territory, the Mini might be the most iPad-y iPad left. I’ve taken a Mini everywhere with me since the very first one. But Apple only updates the Mini sporadically, and those updates sometimes feel like someone inside Apple Park picked its specs by closing their eyes and clicking randomly in an Excel sheet. The Mini is always a little underpowered, a little overpriced, and a little afield in Apple’s tablet lineup. We, the iPad Mini People, sometimes feel a little forgotten.

This year’s model, though, is an upgrade through and through. Apple made the screen larger and better, while making the iPad itself smaller and lighter. It upgraded the processor in a big way. It made the whole package more durable, so you can take it to more places and use it for more things. It actually feels like a tablet made for a reason, not just another occasional bone thrown to the small-tablet fans.

For the past week, I’ve been testing the midnight iPad Mini with cell service, 512GB of storage, and the nano-texture matte display coating. I really like it. It’s the best iPad Mini yet, and a huge leap over the previous model. The one in my hands also costs $1,249, and I cannot in good conscience tell you to buy it. Even the very cheapest version — Wi-Fi only, 128GB of storage, regular OLED display — starts at $699, by a wide margin the highest starting price ever for a Mini.

If you don’t already know the iPad Mini is your one true love, there’s probably a better iPad out there for you. But if you’re an iPad Mini Person and you can stomach the price? You’re getting the best Mini in years.

8

Verge Score

$699

The Good

• OLED display looks great
• Waterproof and dustproof
• A20 Pro chip is a big bump up

The Bad

• $$$$$
• No 120Hz display
• Still no FaceID

The Mini’s new display is its most important and most controversial upgrade. It now measures 8.5 inches instead of 8.3, and it’s now a 2316 x 1512 OLED panel instead of an LCD. The OLED gives the screen a little more dynamic range than the previous model, with brighter bright spots and darker dark spots. Its peak brightness is noticeably brighter than before, and its minimum brightness is low enough to be totally pleasant for reading in the dark (as long as you’re in dark mode). In general, it’s just a little more crisp and contrast-y, in a nice way; the old Mini’s display was the least of my worries, but the OLED is a solid improvement. The tablet I tested also has Apple’s nano-texture matte finish, which seems to dull and darken the screen slightly; on a particularly white background, the whole thing seems to shimmer. I suspect I’d like the OLED panel even more without it.

The nano-texture does, however, do an excellent job of reducing glare. The effect is actually really cool: The textured coating doesn’t extend to the bezels, so you can see a source of light or glare come in from the edge of the screen and then simply disappear as it hits the screen. So what you lose in pure screen fidelity, you gain in the ability to read on the iPad in a coffee shop without it reflecting the overhead lights like a mirror. The nano-texture option costs an extra $100, though, and requires you to upgrade to 256GB of storage, so you’re now looking at a $900 tablet. Spend the extra money on the cellular version or, better yet, don’t spend it at all.

Refresh rates matter!

For some reason, Apple has never deigned to put its ProMotion display tech on the iPad Mini, which has a refresh rate capped at 60Hz rather than the 120Hz you’ll get on most other recent Apple devices. This is such an odd spec choice that it has launched a bunch of conspiracy theories. Maybe it’s to make more people buy an iPhone Duo instead? Maybe it’s a 120Hz panel downgraded to 60Hz by software just to make people upgrade again next time? Apple’s answer, to Chris Lawley and others, has been something to the effect of “120Hz is irrelevant, OLED’s faster pixel response solves the problems.” I don’t agree. I don’t think the lack of ProMotion is an immediate and total dealbreaker, but refresh rates matter! To games and high-touch creative apps, of course, but you notice the difference even with basic swiping and zooming. The Apple Pencil feels more juddery moving across my screen. On a 120Hz screen, I can scroll a browser page and still clearly read the text as it’s moving. With 60Hz, it gets blurry. In all these cases, even if you don’t explicitly see the difference, you really do feel it.

The most meaningful upgrade in the new Mini, at least for me and how I use my iPad, is that it is designed to be more or less waterproof and dustproof. Its IP67 rating means that the Mini got the highest possible score for protection from “solid foreign objects,” which for our purposes mostly just means dust won’t get inside, and is also “protected against the effects of temporary immersion in water.” It’s not quite as rugged as, say, the iPhone 18 Pro, and I don’t recommend using it as an underwater camera or anything, but your tablet should be fine as long as you don’t drop it in the tub and leave it for a while.

This increased ruggedness immediately changed my iPad usage in a couple of ways. I became less worried about handing the Mini to my toddler, whose general stickiness and penchant for spilling things no longer feel like threats. I also started using the Mini more in the kitchen — I love to cook with an iPad nearby for recipes and Community episodes, and it was nice not to be constantly guarding against flour explosions and water spills. At one point, the iPad Mini even came with me in the shower during a particularly close football game. It’s still kicking.

This is, for lack of a better word, the Field iPad.

The Mini’s IP rating is also the feature that finally made me see who Apple sees as the ideal iPad Mini user. This is, for lack of a better word, the Field iPad. We hear all the time about pilots who use Minis instead of sheaves of paperwork, but Apple also sees them in use on construction sites, oil rigs, doctor’s offices, and all kinds of other places. (It’s a fun rabbit hole, actually — can I interest you in an “explosion proof” last-gen Mini for $4,500 or so?) Apple’s goal with the Mini is not really to maximize performance, satisfy the pixel-peepers, or enhance creator workflows. It’s durability and usability. Body and screen.

Apple made a couple of changes to the Mini to receive its IP rating, like ditching the speaker holes and opting for what it calls an Acoustic Display. It means the sound fires out of the front panel rather than from speaker holes. (Some TVs currently work the same way.) It doesn’t sound any better than before, maybe a tiny bit bassier, but it also doesn’t sound worse, and if anything it’s slightly better to have the sound actually pointed at you instead of out the sides of the tablet. Mostly it’s a wash in service of the ruggedization, which is good enough for me.

The rest of the hardware is just wins all the way around. The A20 Pro chip, the chipset also on the iPhone 18 Pro (and the Duo), benchmarks about 50 percent faster than the 2024 Mini for standard computing tasks, and about three times as fast for graphics-intensive ones. (The chip in my review unit has one more CPU core than the A20 Pro in the cheaper Minis; those will still be drastic improvements, but maybe a hair less so.) I notice the difference, even side by side with the old model, in how fast apps load and games play. Games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which were all but unplayable on the 2024 Mini, work nicely on this one. The body is about a tenth of an inch thinner and about an ounce and a half lighter. Perhaps as a result, the battery is a tiny bit smaller, but battery life remains steadfastly somewhere around nine hours of screen time.

One last hardware thing I should mention: Apple moved the front-facing camera from the portrait side of the Mini to the landscape side. On every other iPad, all of which seem to want to be used horizontally, that’s clearly the right decision. On this one, the only iPad I actually hold vertically for long periods, I’m torn. And in either case, that camera still doesn’t enable FaceID — it’s still TouchID or nothing on the Mini.

I thought the last iPad Mini was a disappointment, a product made from spare parts without any particular reason for existence. This year’s Mini feels mostly like a return to form. It’s powerful enough to be useful for a long time. It’s lighter and thinner than ever. The 60Hz refresh rate is a bummer, but I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker for most people. And it’s really the only downside. Though at this price, should you have to deal with any downsides?

This year’s Mini feels mostly like a return to form

After a run of new models and price increases from Apple, it’s worth level-setting a bit on iPad prices. The cheapest model you can buy is now the base iPad at $449, with an A16 chip (the one from the iPhone 14 Pro) and 128GB of storage. The cheapest iPad Air, with an M4 processor and 128GB of storage, is $749. The Pro has an M5 and 256GB for $1,199. iPads are expensive!

In this context, the new Mini’s $699 starting price feels at least $100 too high — this model has always been more expensive than the base iPad, but unless you really want or need the small screen, $50 more gets you a much better and more versatile iPad Air. As ever, the iPad Mini is really only for iPad Mini People (and pilots and oil riggers, apparently). Someday, Apple will give us the tiny flagship we’ve been waiting for, and I’ll gladly pay Apple’s top dollar for it. This is a very good iPad Mini, but it’s not quite the Mini in its final form.

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