Apple today announced the first OLED iPad mini, and it carries a pretty hefty price increase compared to just a few years ago. The new model starts at $699, up $100 (or 17%) from the $599 starting price of the previous generation model.

It's hard to believe now, but the previous-generation iPad mini kept its $499 price in 2024 even when Apple doubled base storage to 128GB. But then earlier this year, Apple increased the starting price to $599 as part of sweeping price increases across its product line owing to memory and chip shortages.

The new model starts with the same 128GB of storage, so the $100 increase since June isn't offset by a capacity bump – but you do get an OLED display instead of LCD.…