So far, in terms of tablets, only a selection of iPad Pros have made the upgrade to OLED panels, but it looks like that will change soon.
Last month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the iPad mini 8 will come with the screen technology upgrade and could arrive “as early as next year”. Now a reliable leaker has backed up both the screen technology and timeframe, narrowing down the release window to the back end of 2026.
On Weibo, Instant Digital writes that the iPad mini will indeed be the first to get the OLED treatment with the iPad Air seeing “no movement yet” (an inexact translation from Google Translate, but it certainly gets the meaning across).
This is a big upgrade. Each pixel on an OLED panel is self-lit, ensuring perfect contrast and the kinds of deep, inky blacks that LCD screens can’t match.
While this estimate covers a full six-month period, the smart money would be on a September or October 2026 launch.
In the machine-translated comments, Instant Digital is asked whether it will still be a 60Hz panel. “I don’t know,” he replies, adding that “the earliest it will be released is the third or fourth quarter of next year, we'll see then.”
That’s between July 1 and December 31, ruling out the same spring reveal that the iPad mini 5 enjoyed back in 2019.
While this estimate covers a full six-month period, the smart money would be on a September or October 2026 launch, given the current iPad mini 7 was released on October 23 last year, and the iPad mini 6 emerged on September 24, 2021 .
Beyond the OLED panel, we’ve only seen one other major leak about the iPad mini 8 so far. Back in August, ten upcoming products were outed in a massive leak in Apple’s own software code. Among them was the next iPad mini, and the revelation that it will use the same A19 Pro chip as the brand new iPhone 17 Pro.
Given the current iPad mini 7 uses the same A17 Pro chip as found in the ageing iPhone 15 Pro, that would be quite an upgrade. Geekbench pegs this chip as averaging a score of 2,885 in single-core performance, rising to 7,186 in multi-core. For the A17 Pro, this rises to figures of 3,763 and 9,745 respectively.
Of course, if it does arrive in October, this chipset won’t be Apple’s newest mobile silicon anymore, with the A20 Pro-powered iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Fold due to arrive a month earlier.
2026, Apple’s 50th anniversary year, is shaping up to be a big one for the company, with no fewer than 15 new products anticipated. But for some, an iPad mini with an OLED screen to match the best iPhones will be the most exciting of the lot.
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