Apple is reportedly set to unveil an iPad mini 8 with an OLED display, and people invited to its Los Angeles event on Wednesday, October 28 are expected to get hands-on time with it. Everything below is rumor, not confirmation.
The tablet is said to use Apple's A20 Pro chip, built on TSMC's 2nm process (a measure of how finely the transistors are manufactured). Compared with the A17 Pro in the current mini, the rumored gains are a CPU up to around 1.5× faster and a GPU up to around 2.5× faster. The chip would also carry a "dual 16-core Neural Engine," the part that handles machine-learning work, for 32 cores in total.
Memory would rise from 8GB to 12GB. That extra RAM is tied to a rumored feature letting users adjust the pace and expressiveness of Siri's voice.
The display is the larger change. The current mini uses an LCD panel. The new one would be a slightly larger OLED, where each pixel makes its own light, which allows true blacks and higher contrast. Apple has reportedly tested both 60Hz and 120Hz (ProMotion) refresh rates, and it is unclear which it picked. The bezels would shrink, and the front camera would move to the right bezel, which puts it at the top edge in landscape.
The rest of the list is mostly in-house silicon and plumbing: Apple's N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and a C1X or C2 modem in cellular models. The speaker system would drop its visible holes, possibly with an iPhone-style earpiece speaker in the top bezel. The mini would also get an IP rating for water and dust resistance for the first time.
The same event is expected to bring MacBook Pro models with touch-enabled OLED displays, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M6 chip, and an iMac with an M6 chip.
Taken together, this would make the mini a different product from the current one, with a new screen type, 50% more memory and a newer chip. An OLED panel and 12GB of RAM are both components that tend to cost more. Apple has not announced a price for the iPad mini 8, and none has leaked, so how much of that cost reaches the buyer is the question left for October 28.