Shock report: The new iPad Pro will get an M4 chip before the Mac

Macworld

With Apple’s late-spring event just over a week away, a widely respected leaker has claimed that the company is about to announce a shocking upgrade for the iPad Pro.

Up until now, the received wisdom has been that we’ll hear about relatively pedestrian upgrades to two iPad lines, the Air and the Pro, with the former getting a bump from the M1 to the M2 processor and the latter stepping up from M2 to M3. But according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, the Pro is likely to skip a generation and go straight to the as-yet-unreleased M4.

“I’m hearing there is a strong possibility that the chip in the new iPad Pro will be the M4, not the M3,” Gurman writes in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter. He doesn’t say from whom he heard this, but Gurman’s sources tend to be fairly reliable.

Nevertheless, this is a highly surprising prediction. Not least because the M3 generation of chips has only been around for six months or so, since the launch of new iMac and MacBook Pro models in October 2023. The M4 wasn’t supposed to make its debut until late 2024, in updated versions of the same Macs we heard about last Halloween. Or at WWDC (where Apple sometimes unveils high-powered Macs) in June at the absolute earliest.

The reason why Gurman thinks Apple is prepared to jump the gun on the M4 generation is related to AI, an area on which the upcoming chips are expected to focus: “I believe Apple will position the tablet as its first truly AI-powered device–and that it will tout each new product from then on as an AI device,” he writes. “By introducing the new iPad Pro ahead of [WWDC], Apple could lay out its AI chip strategy without distraction. Then, at WWDC, it could focus on how the M4 chip and new iPad Pros will take advantage of the AI software and services coming as part of iPadOS 18 later this year.”

The other reason, of course, is to help the company differentiate between the Air and far costlier Pro lines, the latter of which it would greatly prefer customers to buy. With the Air expected to get a new larger-screen variant to match the Pro, and cameras being less of an important factor on tablets than they are on smartphones, Apple would have to mainly focus on the Pro’s new OLED screen and somewhat faster processor. Having a much faster processor, and being able to point to the material benefits that it will bring, sounds like a better plan from a marketing point of view.

Apple will make its announcements at the Let Loose event on May 7. For all the latest news and rumors leading up to the big day, check out our iPad Pro and iPad Air superguides.

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