From bgr.com

Apple unveiled the iPad mini 7 earlier this week, giving its smallest tablet the performance bump needed to support Apple Intelligence. That’s the iPad mini 7’s biggest upgrade. The tablet is otherwise identical to its predecessor.

Apple didn’t go with one of the A18 chip flavors in the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, choosing last year’s A17 Pro, which powered the iPhone 15 Pro models. The A18 and A17 Pro chips also come with 8GB of RAM, which is a minimum requirement for Apple Intelligence.

Best of all, Apple made it happen for $499. The iPad mini 7 price matches its predecessor’s despite the big performance bump. I believe that’s a strong indication the iPhone SE 4 will have a great starting price, even though the phone should pack the newer A18 chip.

It turns out the iPad mini 7 doesn’t have exactly the same A17 Pro chip as the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. Apple is using versions of the chip that were not good enough for last year’s Pro phones. But that shouldn’t impact performance too much.

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The iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro features a 6-core CPU, 6-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 8GB of RAM.

The A17 Pro version of the iPad mini 7 is almost identical. The only difference concerns the GPU. We’re looking at a 5-core GPU compared to the iPhone 15 Pro. That information is visible on Apple’s website. You only need to check the products’ specs pages or use Apple’s comparison tools.

As 9to5Mac points out, we’re looking at chip binning. Some chips fail to meet the specified requirements during the quality control process step of manufacturing. Rather than scraping those chips, Apple is giving them a second life in other products. This happened with other versions of the A-series chips in the past.

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The post iPad mini 7’s A17 Pro chip isn’t quite the same as the iPhone 15 Pro first appeared on bgr.com

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