Apple took a year off from launching iPads in 2023 – for the first year in the iPad’s history – and that probably means a stacked tablet schedule in 2024. Now a new chipset leak has given us a better idea of what’s coming our way in the next few months.
This leak comes courtesy of a private social media post seen by MacRumors, and includes a list of 16 Apple devices together with the chips they’re running. Most importantly for our purposes, eight of those devices haven’t been released yet.
Two are listed as having the A14 Bionic chip inside, first seen in the iPad Air 4 and the iPhone 12 from 2020: it’s also in the current 10th-gen iPad launched in 2022, so if the next entry-level iPad uses it as well, it’ll be a running a chip that’s four years old.
Alternatively, they might refer to reconfigured versions of the current iPad that will appear when the next version arrives this year. Another possibility is these devices are actually variants of the HomePod-with-a-display that’s been rumored for a while.
Chips with everything
Moving on, we’ve got two devices with an A17 Pro chip, which made its debut in the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max last year. This piece of silicon could well be powering the iPad mini 7 when it arrives, which would be a hefty upgrade.
Lastly, there are four devices with the M2 chip inside, and MacRumors reckons these are the four iPad Air 6 models – the two rumored 10.9-inch and 12.9-inch sizes, with either Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity on board.
The M2 chip was launched in 2022 and first found its way into the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, before featuring in the latest iPad Pro models. You can also find it powering the Apple Vision Pro that went on sale earlier this year.
All of these various iPads were expected to show up this year, and the new leak doesn’t tell us anything new in that regard – but we’ve now got a better idea of the specs that they’ll come with, and more evidence that they are indeed launching soon.
