With Apple’s brand new M4 iPad Pro still fresh out of the oven, we’ve just seen a leak that confirms Apple is already planning an M5 upgrade for its best iPad, alongside big chip upgrades for its iPad mini 7 and a new 11th generation iPad.
New device identifiers uncovered in the backend of Apple software earlier this week served up confirmation that the iPhone 16 will arrive in four different models with an A18 chip, now the same source seems to point to three exciting future iPad upgrades and two canceled projects.
As posted on X by @aaronp613, the uncovered identifiers reveal three new upcoming iPads: the iPad mini 7, the iPad 11, and a brand new M5 iPad Pro. Perhaps the most surprising inclusion is the M5 iPad Pro, given that Apple’s M4 model is barely three months old. The leak could point to Apple’s transition to a more regular, yearly upgrade cycle for iPad, which reflects the current iPhone schedule and its plans for the Mac lineup too. The iPads, listed as 17,1 through 17,4, point to 11-inch and 13-inch models, both available in either Wi-Fi or Cellular configurations, just like the current version.
iPad leaks galore
The leaked identifiers also indicate Apple is planning to unveil a new 11th-generation iPad in both Wi-Fi and Cellular models, identified as 15,7 and 15,8. According to the leak, the iPad will ship with the A16 chip that debuted in the iPhone 14 Pro in 2022. That might make it a two-year-old chip, but it’s no slouch and more than enough to power Apple’s base model tablet. What’s more, it’s a hefty jump on the iPad 10’s A14 Bionic chip.
More information from the leak indicates that the iPad mini 7 is also coming in both Wi-Fi and Cellular configurations replete with the A17 chip. Whether that’s the A17 Pro from Apple’s best iPhone, the iPhone 15 Pro, or a slightly dumbed-down A17 remains to be seen, but packing all that power into such a tiny tablet will reap immense rewards for processing and multitasking. Perhaps more importantly, it’ll give tremendous efficiency and great battery life, likely retaining the crown as the best iPad for reading.
We'd expect both of these tablets to debut before the year is out.
Three new future products to look forward to, the leak also reveals two interesting cancelled products. The first is an A14 iPad. With that chip already present in the aforementioned iPad 10 and the fourth-generation iPad Air, it’s hard to tell which canceled device this could be, save perhaps a different size of base model iPad that never saw the light of day. Much more obvious is the reference to an iPad 15,3 through 15,6, which appears to be a canceled M3 iPad Pro. Apple’s M2 iPad Pro came out in October 2022, so this could indicate that Apple was planning to launch an M3 replacement late last year, but skipped over M3 to push out M4 early. We can’t know for sure why Apple made this decision, but a likely bet is the burgeoning presence of potent AI chips on the market. It’s possible Apple brought up the M4’s timeline to prove it has powerful AI hardware in the pipeline, a move that would also explain why the chip debuted in an iPad, rather than one of Apple’s new MacBooks.
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