Tech
Apple updates the iPad Mini with a larger OLED display
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Published 10/26/2026 8:05:03 AM
Apple updates the iPad Mini with a larger OLED display
The iPad Mini pairs an 8.5-inch display with a thinner and lighter form factor.
The iPad Mini pairs an 8.5-inch display with a thinner and lighter form factor.
Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a larger, 8.5-inch OLED display. The company revealed the new device just days before its “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday. The iPad Mini starts at $699 for the Wi-Fi-only model, and $849 for Wi-Fi and cellular.
At 5.4mm thick, the iPad Mini is thinner and lighter than its predecessor. It also has bezels that are 24 percent slimmer. This allows the device to maintain the same small form factor with a display that’s slightly larger than the previous generation’s 8.3-inch screen. The iPad Mini offers a peak brightness of up to 1,200 nits, along with a 1-nit minimum brightness that could make it easier on the eyes in dim lighting.
The new device still doesn’t come with Apple’s ProMotion technology for smoother scrolling, as the technical specs say it supports up to 4K resolution at a 60Hz refresh rate.
Aside from an OLED display, the new iPad Mini features an upgraded A20 Pro chip capable of running on-device AI models. This enables support for some of Apple’s new Siri AI features, including the ability to tweak the expressiveness and pace of the assistant’s voice. Although models with 128GB or 256GB of storage come with a five-core CPU with two super cores and three efficiency cores, the 512GB model offers a six-core CPU with two super cores and four efficiency cores. All models come with a 16-core Neural Engine.
Additionally, Apple says the iPad Mini comes with a new “Acoustic Display,” which it describes as including “specially designed woofers” that are “paired through the display to produce punchier bass and more volume.” It also has custom tweeters between the device’s glass and aluminum enclosure “for clearer highs.”
Some other updates include a 12MP front-facing camera that’s now on the long edge of the iPad Mini, making it easier for video calls in landscape orientation. It has an IP67 rating for protection against water and dust, in addition to Apple’s next-gen C2 cellular modem and in-house N1 networking chip. Apple promises up to 10 hours of battery life when watching videos or browsing the web on Wi-Fi.
This new iPad Mini follows Apple’s seventh-generation version released in 2024, which arrived three years after the sixth-generation model in 2021. That seventh-generation iPad Mini, which started at $499, was primarily a spec bump, with the A17 Pro chip, support for the Apple Pencil Pro, and an upgrade to 128GB base storage. In his review, David Pierce called it a “new low for the product” that “feels like an iPad designed by a supply chain, not by someone who actually wants you to like the product.”
The upgraded iPad Mini comes ahead of a string of other rumored product launches that could take place this week, which could include a touchscreen MacBook Pro, along with an M6-equipped MacBook Pro and iMac.
Preorders for the new iPad Mini start on Wednesday, October 28th, with availability on November 6th. The iPad Mini is available in “midnight” and “starlight” colors, along with 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB configurations. There’s a glare-reducing nano-texture display option for the 256GB and 512GB models as well.
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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
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An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
Image: Mozilla
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
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