**The Apple iPad Mini (17 Pro) Review: First Impressions**

As I unwrapped the new Apple iPad Mini 17 Pro, I couldn't help but feel a mix of excitement and skepticism. The device has been touted as an upgraded version of its predecessor, with promises of improved performance, better cameras, and new features. But would it live up to expectations? In this review, we'll take a closer look at the iPad Mini 17 Pro's design, performance, display, and other key features.

**Thermal Performance**

One of my primary concerns with any device is its thermal performance. I was curious to see how the iPad Mini 17 Pro would handle temperature tests. To do this, I used a thermometer to measure the temperature of the device during various tasks. The results were quite impressive. When I ran a benchmarking test that sort of intensifies the overall processing, the temperature rose to around 35.5 degrees Celsius. While it's not excessively warm to the touch, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the device dissipates heat.

**Benchmark Performance**

Next up, I ran some benchmark tests to see how the iPad Mini 17 Pro stacks up against its competitors. The single-core performance was an impressive 2,734 points, while the multicore performance clocked in at 6,56 points. For comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro Max scored significantly lower. However, it's worth noting that I just installed an update on my iPad Mini, which may have affected these results.

**Jelly Scrolling**

One feature that Apple has been struggling to perfect is jelly scrolling – a display effect that makes text and icons seem to move with a fluid motion. Unfortunately, the Jelly Scrolling issue persists on the new iPad Mini 17 Pro. Even when I slowed it down to 10% of its normal speed, I could still see each side of the screen refresh at different rates. This suggests that Apple still hasn't fully addressed this issue.

**Display Comparison**

When comparing the display of the new iPad Mini 17 Pro to its predecessor, I was surprised by how similar they looked. Both devices have a bright and vibrant display with decent contrast. However, upon closer inspection, I noticed that the new device's screen might be slightly more contrasty – although this difference may not be noticeable to everyone.

**Speaker Comparison**

Next up, I put both iPads through their paces to see if the speakers had improved significantly. To my surprise, they sounded virtually identical on both devices. Both had decent sound at high volumes, around 83-84 decibels, and a clear, resonant bass. While I was expecting some improvements in this area, it seems that Apple hasn't made significant strides.

**Final Thoughts**

In conclusion, the Apple iPad Mini 17 Pro is an impressive device that checks many of the boxes for what one would expect from an upgraded tablet. The performance is solid, and the display is bright and vibrant. However, some features – like jelly scrolling – still need improvement. With the new Apple intelligence updates arriving soon, this will be a crucial factor to consider for those eager to try out the new features. For now, if you're in the market for a compact tablet with decent specs, the iPad Mini 17 Pro is definitely worth considering.

**About the Author**

The author of this review is Aaron, who is passionate about technology and always on the lookout for the latest gadgets and innovations. When he's not reviewing devices or testing software, Aaron can be found sharing his knowledge with others through tutorials and blog posts.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone Aaron here for zot and this is the allnew iPad Mini 7th generation or the a17 pro as Apple calls it if we take a look at the back you can see 128 gbt that's what it starts at it says iPad Mini a17 Pro and it comes in Wi-Fi or cellular it still has the same price as before $4.99 goes from 1228 to 256 or 512 goes from $4.99 to 9.49 and is available in four colors blue purple Starlight and space gray that we have here now let's go ahead and open it up so we'll take off the little pull tabs here and see what we've got this is basically the same box we had before it doesn't look like they've made any changes here just to the back of the box where it says A7 Pro with apple intelligence and here's the iPad so iPad in space gray as you can see here let's set that aside we'll see what we've got in the box so at least we have charger but we'll take a look at that in a moment nothing else in here we've got the quick start guide and then a little warranty card no stickers let's place this away inside we have a braided USBC to USBC cable I'm glad Apple's adding the braided cables basically to everything and then we also have an adapter so you can see here this is a 20 WT adapter and that's what's included at least they're still including it it's basically the same box we had before as well let's close this up here and let's take a closer look at the iPad so we'll go ahead and unwrap this here now on the back the differentiating factor here is that it says iPad Mini the previous generation does not say mini on the back in fact I have it nearby and you can see it here so it says iPad now it says iPad Mini as far as the overall design it's pretty much the same as before we have our power sleep wake button at the top along with our Touch ID or fingerprint sensor we have two speakers one of these is a resonance chamber we also have our volume buttons on the top as well on the right hand side we have our attachment for our apple pencil that will allow it to charge as well we'll compare this in just a moment and then on the bottom again our speaker grills along with USBC and this time it's actually USB 3.1 at 10 gbits per second that's an advantage we get from the new chipset on the left hand side we don't have anything at all on the back we have a 12 megapixel f1.8 camera just like we did before it records in 4k 60 as far as video has smart HDR 4 this time up from three and then the front-facing camera is the same as well so right here we have a 12 megapixel f2.4 it records at 1080p60 no change there now compared side by side with the other one you'll see side by side it's basically the exact same thing dimensions in all and you can see that here so this looks like maybe the area for the pencil is slightly thinner but the overall size is identical as far as the thickness and everything else so the little area for where the pencil attaches is slightly different since it uses a different one it looks like but everything else looks basically the same from the top to the sides we'll move it around here from the sides here to the bottom everything's identical so no changes there as far as the way it looks now let's go ahead and turn it on so we'll Boot It Up there and as it's starting up we'll place the old case on it so this is actually from the sixth generation iPad Mini so if you have one of those cases it will work just fine it will attach no problems it's stuck on the back and no issues here so it's booted up let's go ahead and get it set up so we'll tap English then let me bring in a phone to get it paired it's connected let's go ahead and pair it using the camera it says waiting for iPhone we'll get this set up using the iPhone and we'll just set this up as new we'll get it set up for me then we'll put in the password from the iPhone says it may take a few minutes to activate your iPad so we'll give it just a moment here now it says there's a software update we'll do this later so we can see what version it was installed with we have to agree to the data and privacy we'll hit continue then we have to set up Touch ID so let's go ahead and do that just place our finger on here get this set up quickly I always appreciate this on iPad however on the iPad it works really well with face ID however Touch ID definitely is something many people would welcome on many devices still it says capture all of your fingerprint so now we'll just move it around a little bit more from different angles and there we go it's added now we could add another fingerprint but we'll tap continue or we'll hit cancel we'll tap continue and it will set up the account I don't want to add another finger at this point now it says signing in to Apple ID we have to agree to the terms and conditions now as we're waiting for this this actually has the same display as before but it may not have the jelly scrolling we'll check that a little bit later once this is all set up but this has an 8.3in display 2266 X 1488 at 326 pixels per inch it has an anti-reflective coating goes up to 500 nits of brightness has P3 wide color and that's about it it doesn't go up to 1,000 knits doesn't have the mini LED display or OLED which is a bit of a shame at this price point internally we have the new A7 Pro processor with apple intelligence but it has one less GPU core or five cores and it has a six core CPU it has less resolution than an iPhone 15 Pro even though it has a similar chipset with one less GPU so it shouldn't be an issue this does have 8 gigs of RAM as well which allows for Apple intelligence that's the big differentiator here with the non-pro iPhone 15s apparently where you need 8 gigs of RAM to run that smoothly so again let's wait for the this to set up and then we'll continue it should be just about done it says enjoy your new iPad on the iPhone there it completed and it says make this your new iPad so let's go ahead and go to continue or customize rather and we don't want to transfer anything you could of course restore this from a backup but let's go ahead and not transfer anything and then we'll just tap continue we'll have it only download automatically I'll enable location services it's asking if I want to continue the beta program not on this device for now since we're setting it up as new and now it says welcome to iPad this is the default wallpaper that it came with so that's what this looks like let's take a look at what version we have on it so we'll go to settings then General then about you'll see this comes pre-installed with iPad OS 18 with version 22A 8350 for the build number if we go ahead and go back let's go to General go to software update give it just a moment you'll see we have a day one update where it's fixing a few things so performance Maybe impacted due to an issue with memory allocation on some iPad models and it fixes issues with messages just like we had with iOS 18.1 we have support for two different Apple pencils this time USBC the new one that's a little bit less expensive and then also the apple pencil Pro so the apple pencil Pro Works a little bit better with tilt sensors and more you don't necessarily need it but it will charge right from the side here so if we pair it just like that you have the squeeze gesture and then you can switch tools with the gesture you can try the squeeze so you can hover over and squeeze it then tap continue and then you can scribble of course this is something we've had for a while and now we're in so we can use the apple pencil with it we can bring up different gestures if we go into notes so scroll down continue then we'll go into a new note and then we can draw as we want squeeze it and we've got our little toolbar here so just like we have on the other iPad this supports it it also supports hover so if we go over you might be able to see that little dot there as I hover over the top of it squeeze it and then again I can hover over and you can see things expand as I'm moving over it without touching it now we'll check the jelly scrolling in just a moment but I want to get this updated to make sure that it actually has all of the latest updates and it fixes anything that it may have however this does have 10 hours of battery life surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video and wirelessly it has 5G support but it's eim only this time around we also have y 6E support and Bluetooth 5.3 those are all thanks to the a17 pro so let me go ahead and unlock it and let's get it updated the iPad's been updated to iPad OS 18.01 so we're good to go there and let's take a closer look at things such as the wallpaper so if we go down to wallpaper We'll add new wallpaper and you'll see what we have here iPad OS we have collections which this is the new iPad mini and basically the same thing we had before so they really haven't updated this a whole lot really giving us basically what we had previously so if we add this version it's the same as iPad OS 18 we'll go ahead and add it and now we're updated to the latest wallpaper that matches what we have right here on the box basically a little bit more vibrant colors though now as far as the overall speed well basically this is going to be the same it was promised with apple intelligence that doesn't come out for well about another half a week or so at this point probably next Monday that will bring Apple intelligence features to this so this will support it if we go into geekbench 6 give it a second to load here you'll see we do in fact have 8 gigs of RAM so 7.73 and it's running at 3.78 GHz let's go ahead and run some benchmarks see what they get and this just did install everything as far as iPad OS 18.01 but it's barely warm on the back as this runs as it sort of intensifies the overall processing let's take a look at the overall heat it's some as some people are concerned about that it's barely warm to the touch at all so we're still running benchmarks I've let it run for a little bit we have the thermal camera here and this gives you an idea of what it looks like so the processor must be somewhere in this area and according to the Fleer thermal camera we're at about 35.5 de cius so not terribly warm and just to the touch it's barely warm at all so around 35° C nothing too concerning there I wouldn't really be concerned about it anyway and it seems to be dissipating heat well but that gives you an idea of where the processor is and how it's getting rid of heat benchmarks completed and we have 2,734 for single core 6,56 for multicore compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max that we have here this gives you an idea you can see that it definitely must have one less core as we have 687 for multicore and 2,828 for single core now keep in mind I just installed an update so that could change a little bit but it's plenty fast and again should run Apple intelligence without a problem now as far as jelly scrolling on this well let's go ahead and maybe go to Apple as you can see at 240 frames per second it does not appear that the jelly scrolling is fixed in fact if I slow it down to 10% of that you can actually see each side of the screen refresh at different rates it looks identical on both displays whether it's regular icons or text or anything else so it looks like it really isn't fixed and it's something that they haven't addressed with this particular iPad at least from what I'm seeing when it was in horizontal mode it seems to be fixed just like it was before based on the overall scroll screen Scroll of the screen but in general it does not appear that it was resolved in this particular update the jelly scrolling may be a little bit less severe on the new iPad as I scroll through this page you'll see it seems to be at the same scroll speed but maybe there's some differences there with the overall processor helping it out a little bit but it's definitely still there and if that's something that bothers you it will bother you on the new iPad as far as overall contrast and the display itself it looks to be very similar so side by side these are at the same brightness level maybe the new one is slightly more contrasty but it looks pretty much the same to me I don't think there's much of a difference here at all as far as the display is concerned now let's go ahead and take a listen to the speakers see if they sound any different as well I have both iPads ready to go with royalty-free music let's go ahead and take a listen to the older iPad first and we'll try and measure the decibel level using the Apple watch here's the new iPad Mini now the speakers sound identical to me on both iPads both have decent sound at high volume about 83 to 84 DB seems to be their Peak according to what we were measuring and they sound pretty clear with decent base thanks to the resonance Chambers but I don't think the speakers are any different this time around and one of the things I was a little bit disappointed with is the actual jelly scrolling it seems like it still has as it despite some others saying it doesn't under slow motion it looks like it definitely does so that's something that may still bother some people but let me know what you think of it in the comments below there's not much more to say about this we'll get apple intelligence within a week or so then we'll have all the features with the new Siri we'll have writing tools updates to photos with cleanup and more but that's about it for the new iPad Mini no new screen which is something I'm surprised they didn't update and we still have fairly large bezels however I don't think that's a bad thing as you sort of hang on to this without covering the display as much but this is definitely still something I think people are going to be very happy about since it's the latest iPad sort of chipset and you can continue to use the smaller iPad Mini let me know what you think of it in the comments below if there's anything else you want to know about the iPad mini a17 pro version I'd love to hear from you as well if you'd like to get your hands on this wallpaper I'll link it in the description and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next timehi everyone Aaron here for zot and this is the allnew iPad Mini 7th generation or the a17 pro as Apple calls it if we take a look at the back you can see 128 gbt that's what it starts at it says iPad Mini a17 Pro and it comes in Wi-Fi or cellular it still has the same price as before $4.99 goes from 1228 to 256 or 512 goes from $4.99 to 9.49 and is available in four colors blue purple Starlight and space gray that we have here now let's go ahead and open it up so we'll take off the little pull tabs here and see what we've got this is basically the same box we had before it doesn't look like they've made any changes here just to the back of the box where it says A7 Pro with apple intelligence and here's the iPad so iPad in space gray as you can see here let's set that aside we'll see what we've got in the box so at least we have charger but we'll take a look at that in a moment nothing else in here we've got the quick start guide and then a little warranty card no stickers let's place this away inside we have a braided USBC to USBC cable I'm glad Apple's adding the braided cables basically to everything and then we also have an adapter so you can see here this is a 20 WT adapter and that's what's included at least they're still including it it's basically the same box we had before as well let's close this up here and let's take a closer look at the iPad so we'll go ahead and unwrap this here now on the back the differentiating factor here is that it says iPad Mini the previous generation does not say mini on the back in fact I have it nearby and you can see it here so it says iPad now it says iPad Mini as far as the overall design it's pretty much the same as before we have our power sleep wake button at the top along with our Touch ID or fingerprint sensor we have two speakers one of these is a resonance chamber we also have our volume buttons on the top as well on the right hand side we have our attachment for our apple pencil that will allow it to charge as well we'll compare this in just a moment and then on the bottom again our speaker grills along with USBC and this time it's actually USB 3.1 at 10 gbits per second that's an advantage we get from the new chipset on the left hand side we don't have anything at all on the back we have a 12 megapixel f1.8 camera just like we did before it records in 4k 60 as far as video has smart HDR 4 this time up from three and then the front-facing camera is the same as well so right here we have a 12 megapixel f2.4 it records at 1080p60 no change there now compared side by side with the other one you'll see side by side it's basically the exact same thing dimensions in all and you can see that here so this looks like maybe the area for the pencil is slightly thinner but the overall size is identical as far as the thickness and everything else so the little area for where the pencil attaches is slightly different since it uses a different one it looks like but everything else looks basically the same from the top to the sides we'll move it around here from the sides here to the bottom everything's identical so no changes there as far as the way it looks now let's go ahead and turn it on so we'll Boot It Up there and as it's starting up we'll place the old case on it so this is actually from the sixth generation iPad Mini so if you have one of those cases it will work just fine it will attach no problems it's stuck on the back and no issues here so it's booted up let's go ahead and get it set up so we'll tap English then let me bring in a phone to get it paired it's connected let's go ahead and pair it using the camera it says waiting for iPhone we'll get this set up using the iPhone and we'll just set this up as new we'll get it set up for me then we'll put in the password from the iPhone says it may take a few minutes to activate your iPad so we'll give it just a moment here now it says there's a software update we'll do this later so we can see what version it was installed with we have to agree to the data and privacy we'll hit continue then we have to set up Touch ID so let's go ahead and do that just place our finger on here get this set up quickly I always appreciate this on iPad however on the iPad it works really well with face ID however Touch ID definitely is something many people would welcome on many devices still it says capture all of your fingerprint so now we'll just move it around a little bit more from different angles and there we go it's added now we could add another fingerprint but we'll tap continue or we'll hit cancel we'll tap continue and it will set up the account I don't want to add another finger at this point now it says signing in to Apple ID we have to agree to the terms and conditions now as we're waiting for this this actually has the same display as before but it may not have the jelly scrolling we'll check that a little bit later once this is all set up but this has an 8.3in display 2266 X 1488 at 326 pixels per inch it has an anti-reflective coating goes up to 500 nits of brightness has P3 wide color and that's about it it doesn't go up to 1,000 knits doesn't have the mini LED display or OLED which is a bit of a shame at this price point internally we have the new A7 Pro processor with apple intelligence but it has one less GPU core or five cores and it has a six core CPU it has less resolution than an iPhone 15 Pro even though it has a similar chipset with one less GPU so it shouldn't be an issue this does have 8 gigs of RAM as well which allows for Apple intelligence that's the big differentiator here with the non-pro iPhone 15s apparently where you need 8 gigs of RAM to run that smoothly so again let's wait for the this to set up and then we'll continue it should be just about done it says enjoy your new iPad on the iPhone there it completed and it says make this your new iPad so let's go ahead and go to continue or customize rather and we don't want to transfer anything you could of course restore this from a backup but let's go ahead and not transfer anything and then we'll just tap continue we'll have it only download automatically I'll enable location services it's asking if I want to continue the beta program not on this device for now since we're setting it up as new and now it says welcome to iPad this is the default wallpaper that it came with so that's what this looks like let's take a look at what version we have on it so we'll go to settings then General then about you'll see this comes pre-installed with iPad OS 18 with version 22A 8350 for the build number if we go ahead and go back let's go to General go to software update give it just a moment you'll see we have a day one update where it's fixing a few things so performance Maybe impacted due to an issue with memory allocation on some iPad models and it fixes issues with messages just like we had with iOS 18.1 we have support for two different Apple pencils this time USBC the new one that's a little bit less expensive and then also the apple pencil Pro so the apple pencil Pro Works a little bit better with tilt sensors and more you don't necessarily need it but it will charge right from the side here so if we pair it just like that you have the squeeze gesture and then you can switch tools with the gesture you can try the squeeze so you can hover over and squeeze it then tap continue and then you can scribble of course this is something we've had for a while and now we're in so we can use the apple pencil with it we can bring up different gestures if we go into notes so scroll down continue then we'll go into a new note and then we can draw as we want squeeze it and we've got our little toolbar here so just like we have on the other iPad this supports it it also supports hover so if we go over you might be able to see that little dot there as I hover over the top of it squeeze it and then again I can hover over and you can see things expand as I'm moving over it without touching it now we'll check the jelly scrolling in just a moment but I want to get this updated to make sure that it actually has all of the latest updates and it fixes anything that it may have however this does have 10 hours of battery life surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video and wirelessly it has 5G support but it's eim only this time around we also have y 6E support and Bluetooth 5.3 those are all thanks to the a17 pro so let me go ahead and unlock it and let's get it updated the iPad's been updated to iPad OS 18.01 so we're good to go there and let's take a closer look at things such as the wallpaper so if we go down to wallpaper We'll add new wallpaper and you'll see what we have here iPad OS we have collections which this is the new iPad mini and basically the same thing we had before so they really haven't updated this a whole lot really giving us basically what we had previously so if we add this version it's the same as iPad OS 18 we'll go ahead and add it and now we're updated to the latest wallpaper that matches what we have right here on the box basically a little bit more vibrant colors though now as far as the overall speed well basically this is going to be the same it was promised with apple intelligence that doesn't come out for well about another half a week or so at this point probably next Monday that will bring Apple intelligence features to this so this will support it if we go into geekbench 6 give it a second to load here you'll see we do in fact have 8 gigs of RAM so 7.73 and it's running at 3.78 GHz let's go ahead and run some benchmarks see what they get and this just did install everything as far as iPad OS 18.01 but it's barely warm on the back as this runs as it sort of intensifies the overall processing let's take a look at the overall heat it's some as some people are concerned about that it's barely warm to the touch at all so we're still running benchmarks I've let it run for a little bit we have the thermal camera here and this gives you an idea of what it looks like so the processor must be somewhere in this area and according to the Fleer thermal camera we're at about 35.5 de cius so not terribly warm and just to the touch it's barely warm at all so around 35° C nothing too concerning there I wouldn't really be concerned about it anyway and it seems to be dissipating heat well but that gives you an idea of where the processor is and how it's getting rid of heat benchmarks completed and we have 2,734 for single core 6,56 for multicore compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max that we have here this gives you an idea you can see that it definitely must have one less core as we have 687 for multicore and 2,828 for single core now keep in mind I just installed an update so that could change a little bit but it's plenty fast and again should run Apple intelligence without a problem now as far as jelly scrolling on this well let's go ahead and maybe go to Apple as you can see at 240 frames per second it does not appear that the jelly scrolling is fixed in fact if I slow it down to 10% of that you can actually see each side of the screen refresh at different rates it looks identical on both displays whether it's regular icons or text or anything else so it looks like it really isn't fixed and it's something that they haven't addressed with this particular iPad at least from what I'm seeing when it was in horizontal mode it seems to be fixed just like it was before based on the overall scroll screen Scroll of the screen but in general it does not appear that it was resolved in this particular update the jelly scrolling may be a little bit less severe on the new iPad as I scroll through this page you'll see it seems to be at the same scroll speed but maybe there's some differences there with the overall processor helping it out a little bit but it's definitely still there and if that's something that bothers you it will bother you on the new iPad as far as overall contrast and the display itself it looks to be very similar so side by side these are at the same brightness level maybe the new one is slightly more contrasty but it looks pretty much the same to me I don't think there's much of a difference here at all as far as the display is concerned now let's go ahead and take a listen to the speakers see if they sound any different as well I have both iPads ready to go with royalty-free music let's go ahead and take a listen to the older iPad first and we'll try and measure the decibel level using the Apple watch here's the new iPad Mini now the speakers sound identical to me on both iPads both have decent sound at high volume about 83 to 84 DB seems to be their Peak according to what we were measuring and they sound pretty clear with decent base thanks to the resonance Chambers but I don't think the speakers are any different this time around and one of the things I was a little bit disappointed with is the actual jelly scrolling it seems like it still has as it despite some others saying it doesn't under slow motion it looks like it definitely does so that's something that may still bother some people but let me know what you think of it in the comments below there's not much more to say about this we'll get apple intelligence within a week or so then we'll have all the features with the new Siri we'll have writing tools updates to photos with cleanup and more but that's about it for the new iPad Mini no new screen which is something I'm surprised they didn't update and we still have fairly large bezels however I don't think that's a bad thing as you sort of hang on to this without covering the display as much but this is definitely still something I think people are going to be very happy about since it's the latest iPad sort of chipset and you can continue to use the smaller iPad Mini let me know what you think of it in the comments below if there's anything else you want to know about the iPad mini a17 pro version I'd love to hear from you as well if you'd like to get your hands on this wallpaper I'll link it in the description and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time\n"