Just brilliant! May I humbly suggest that you now begin every review of new Apple hardware with this sentence and simply change out the device to the one under review.
Sure, an M-series chipset would have been more desirable. So would OLED or 120Hz -- but that's just not the iPad mini.
Waiting three years to offer just a chipset upgrade is disappointing to the larger purchase base, even if I'm fine with it.
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single product that has ever gotten a major re-design from Apple and then was re-designed again in its next iteration. Which of course makes total sense from a business perspective since you need to amortize the costs of a total re-design over more than one iteration of a product. So thinking there would be a "new" Mini 7 after the total overhaul that gave us the Mini 6 was always a baseless expectation, not that this will stop people from complaining about Apple's "failure" to deliver a re-design anyway. As for an M-chip or advanced display upgrade, you're back to pricing the iPad Mini out of its target market, so that was never going to happen, either. For the sake of future-proofing, especially for a model that gets updated infrequently, I would have liked to have seen a bump to what is fast-becoming mass market WiFi 7 and question if the lack of the new standard is really about the A17 Pro chip not supporting it. Maybe so, but I'd point out that the M4-powered iPad Pros don't offer Wifi 7 either.
Overall, a great review of the Mini 7 and very accurate summary of its pros and cons.
