Apple refreshed most of its tablets in 2024. In 2025, the iPad 11 might become the company's best tablet thanks to this upgrade.

The bigger iPads are increasingly competing with your laptop; the Mini very much still complements it. The Mini has always felt like an afterthought — updated only occasionally, forced to run apps and an OS clearly designed for larger screens — but the one-handed iPad was the one for me anyway.

It was a lean few years for the iPad. The tablet fell out of favor with Apple, as the company turned its focus to other categories like mobile, content,

The Mini's less-powerful, year-old phone processor holds it back. In Geekbench 6 tests, the Mini's single-core speed seemed to handle as well as other M1 and M2 iPads, but in multicore modes, it was worse than a last-gen M1-equipped iPad Air.

The most important thing about the new iPad mini is that, on the one hand, it’s a pretty minimal update. It got a better processor—the A17 Pro from last year’s Pro iPhones—and Apple supposedly fixed a display refresh problem that previously caused what is known as “jellyscrolling” where one side of the display refreshes slower than the other.

Enter the new 2024 refresh of the iPad mini, which releases October 23. For the most part, it’s the same as the previous generation—but Apple has laser-focused on a couple of tweaks to modernize the device just enough to keep it competitive in the company’s current ecosystem.