iPad Mini (A20 Pro) Review Roundup

David Pierce at The Verge, on the 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. Stephen Robles, on YouTube, thinks it sounds muffled at high volumes and doesn’t seem to like how you can feel the whole tablet vibrate at high volumes. Tony Polanco at Tom’s Guide liked the Acoustic Display sound quality and praised the battery life (but only had time to run the battery test once): In the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves continuous web-surfing over Wi-Fi with the display set to 150 nits of brightness, the iPad mini 8 lasted for an astonishing 14 hours and 24 minutes! That’s nearly four hours longer than the previous model and Apple’s claims. John Voorhees at MacStories was impressed by the Mini’s local AI performance: The mini’s local AI capabilities extend beyond software optimized for the Neural Engine. To explore those, I ran Qwen 3.5 4B (4-bit) locally using a benchmark built into Russet, a local AI and developer tool. The 512GB iPad mini averaged a pace of 40 tokens per second across four sessions on both tests that output 128 or 256 tokens with a time to first token of 0.32 seconds for the 128 output token tests and 0.36 for the 256 output token tests. I couldn’t compare the new mini’s local AI performance to my 6th generation iPad mini because it only has 4GB of memory, which is too little for the models Russet offers for download. Instead, I downloaded the same model on my 11-inch M4 iPad Pro and ran the same Russet benchmark. The A20 Pro came out on top in my tests. The Russet tests I ran use MLX, which runs on the CPU and GPU, so they don’t measure the benefit of the Dual 16-core Neural Engine. However, they do demonstrate the A20 Pro’s serious local AI capabilities.  ★