Apple iPad Mini A20 Pro Is 2nm, From $699 on Nov. 6

Apple on Monday unveiled a new iPad mini with an A20 Pro chip on what the company calls its latest 2-nanometer process, priced from $699, Apple said in a newsroom post dated Oct. 26.

Pre-orders open Wednesday, Oct. 28, in 36 countries and regions, including the United States. Apple said the Wi-Fi model starts at $699 and the Wi-Fi plus cellular model at $849. The company said customers and stores get the tablet on Friday, Nov. 6. The display is an 8.5-inch OLED panel. Apple says peak brightness reaches 1,200 nits, which it describes as more than twice the previous iPad mini.

The number that matters for this desk is the process, not the screen. A 2-nanometer chip in a $699 product is a high-volume use of the process class leading AI accelerators are also moving toward. Apple did not name the foundry. It also did not publish a power draw in watts, so the post does not show how much data-center electricity an on-device model would displace. Apple says the chip is built for on-device AI, including local large language models.

What Apple specifies

Apple says the A20 Pro has a 7-core GPU with a neural accelerator in each graphics core, and up to a 6-core CPU. Against the previous iPad mini, Apple claims up to 60 percent faster multithreaded performance, up to 2.7 times the graphics performance, and up to 4.5 times the AI performance. On the 512GB configuration, Apple says a dual 16-core Neural Engine doubles the previous generation's processing power, and that unified memory bandwidth more than doubles. Apple did not state a memory capacity in gigabytes, and it did not describe the test behind the 4.5 times claim.

Samsung is ordering tools to lift Taylor Fab 1 toward 20,000 wafers a month at 2 nanometers, as Voltgrid reported. That is a different company and a foundry plan, not this tablet. It is the other 2-nanometer capacity figure already on the site.

What is not on the spec sheet

Apple did not say who builds the 2-nanometer chip, and it did not give a thermal design power. The dual Neural Engine is described on the 512GB configuration. The newsroom post does not say the smaller storage tiers have the same engine. Pre-orders are not open yet. They start on Oct. 28, and the first units are scheduled for Nov. 6. Apple also said the enclosure uses 100 percent recycled aluminum and the battery uses 100 percent recycled cobalt, and that 40 percent of the supply-chain energy is renewable. Those are material claims, not a watt rating.