No Smart Connector and no first-party keyboard. 9to5Mac argues that the iPad mini is the last iPad that's only an iPad, and that the OLED model is the purest version Apple has shipped, even as floating windows arrive on every other iPad.
The upgrades back that up. The screen grows from 8.3 to 8.5 inches inside the same footprint, the panel is OLED with a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio on Apple's spec sheet, and the body drops to 5.4 mm. The Acoustic Display is the change the channel thinks nobody's talking about: there are no speaker grilles anywhere, sound comes through and around the screen, and that's how this becomes the first iPad rated IP67. The A20 Pro also brings true extended display support to a non-M-series iPad, so a USB-C cable and a monitor turn it into something like a small desktop.
The 60Hz panel is the compromise, and the video reads it as deliberate, a way to leave the iPhone Duo the better screen. One correction to the chip claims: the video says the 512GB model adds CPU and GPU cores, but Apple's spec page lists the same 7-core GPU on every model. What the 512GB tier adds is a sixth CPU core and a dual 16-core Neural Engine.
I'd hold the refresh rate against it more than the video does, because it's the one difference a reader feels on every scroll, and the iPhone Duo vs iPad mini 7 comparison already made 120Hz the Duo's clearest win. The purest iPad still scrolls like the last one.
