Okay Gurman, if you’re right, all is forgiven.
In Uncle Mark’s Newsletter of occasional joy this week, he casually dropped the bombshell that he’s hearing and I quote, a STRONG POSSIBILITY that the iPad Pro set to be introduced on May 7th won’t be powered by the M3 in a way that would make sense, but ACTUALLY be the first M4 device on sale.
What now?
It’s a confusing move. Not just because everyone has been saying forever that iPad Pro already has way more power than it can make use of. It’s the software everyone wants fixing. So here we are, with the latest generation of Apple silicon coming first to Apple’s least computer… computer.
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg had said before that part of the hold up had been for a special version of iOS 17.5 for these iPads, which, if you’re changing to a completely new chip inside, that could make sense. But what is that version going to add ahead of WWDC when iOS & iPadOS 18 will be revealed? I mean, maybe a way to run Mac Apps on iPad Pro? That would make a few people sit up and pay attention.
And no, I’m not talking about running MacOS. I’m talking about something like Catalyst, the way Apple allowed iPad apps to be easily wrapped up and ported to the Mac. So at the point of creating your binary, perhaps Xcode could bundle any required frameworks that the iPad wouldn’t otherwise have, and adjust some touch targets? That could be pretty cool.
What else would fix iPad for the detractors? Just let it have Finder so you can browse files and move stuff around like a Mac, instead of the honestly piss weak “Files” which is about adequate for the iPhone, but not so much iPad Pro.
Another thing that would be pretty great is if you could do all the external Pro-Res Video recording with iPad Pro that iPhone 15 Pro got last year, and allowing Final Cut Pro to edit from said external drive so you don’t need infinite on board storage.
That stuff would all make sense. But why start in the iPad Pro? Because it’s been heavily criticised by reviewers recently, just like the 13” MacBook Pro was. And guess what, if you wanted to try the M2 early on, it arrived first in that MacBook Pro, ahead of the M2 MacBook Air redesign. And with M3, you could get it first in the new 14” MacBook Pro. Apple is forcing reviewers to talk about their new iPad stuff if they want access to the latest chip. Tim Cook is a crafty one.
Not only that, It’ll also have all that happy happy AI goodness we’ve been hearing about this side of WWDC, meaning they can talk about the capability of these new chips earlier. I’d not be surprised if we see at least one Mac with M4 at WWDC as well… or what if we got a Mac mini with it in May… No, don’t get your hopes up Dave.
We also heard the chip process being used for M3 was having yield issues, while the new M4 will be on a more reliable and improved node, which may explain why we didn’t see the bigger ultra or Extreme chips with that process - it may actually be cheaper for Apple to make M4 chips than M3 was.
PLUS - Getting it out before June means they’ll beat the Snapdragon X Elite to market too, which looks like it may be quicker than M3, so what a fun little poke for that to already be last generation before the Elite gets here, assuming the M4 can outpace it.
So, there we go. M4 iPad Pros could make sense. This is of course unconfirmed, but Gurman, at least when not talking about dates tends to be about as reliable as rumours get, just like the concept of this new Apple Pencil getting haptics at the event too.
With Apple’s first AI forward device, May 7th just got WAY more interesting.
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