I think it’s more important that N3E is going to be cheaper to make than N3B, and Apple plans to spend the extra silicon budget on the neural engine this year…
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Will the New iPad Pro Really Have the M4 Chip?
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So 10 pages in and no-one's mentioned it;
It's not unprecedented as the splash page says, Apple ironically have form here, you might say coincidental form.
I got 'shafted' on my iPad 3 purchase with the retina display where after 6 months it was replaced with a new one which was lighter and faster, if I recall it was manufacturing issues that it was blamed on, the new chip wasn't ready on time & they had to release it for 'demand'.
Seems like Apple just like skipping the no. 3 -
iPad 3 replaced after 6 months.
iPhone 3 didn't exist (iPhone 3G was really iPhone 2)
It's not unprecedented as the splash page says, Apple ironically have form here, you might say coincidental form.
I got 'shafted' on my iPad 3 purchase with the retina display where after 6 months it was replaced with a new one which was lighter and faster, if I recall it was manufacturing issues that it was blamed on, the new chip wasn't ready on time & they had to release it for 'demand'.
Seems like Apple just like skipping the no. 3 -
iPad 3 replaced after 6 months.
iPhone 3 didn't exist (iPhone 3G was really iPhone 2)
I too got shafted on the iPad 3 and remember that well… My hat’s tipped to you as a fellow iPad 3 “sufferer.” 😄
What a solidly built device, though – that thing was bulletproof.
Then why M3 MBA. Even the MBPs could have been released now and not end of last year with M3 if N3B was too expensive.
I got an iPad Air because I thought touch ID would be okay & it is a tiny bit of a pain but the main thing is the keyboard is THE best keyboard I have ever had. Which it ought to be, for like $300 🍸🙀 I can see replacing the air with an iPad pro, but ... it has to have a great keyboard. And I will be trying that baby out in the store.🍸🐈
Possibly bulletproof, but not shatter proof.
Only apple product that I've dropped where the screen cracked 1st time, only on a corner though - fell off a counter, flipped over onto a stool & then flipped when it hit the ground, I blame the weight of the thing personally!
Obviously it just wasn't meant to be!😂
Yeah, I have the M1 11" Pro and I highly doubt anything they do here will even sway my desire for an upgrade. Maybe better battery life? But that's about it. The software is too limiting for a faster processor to mean anything to me on it at this point.
Try Low Power Mode; add it to Control Center and toggle it on before you put your iPad away.
I always wondered why iPads started out with iOS then started to run iPadOS and lost some possibilities? Now we have iPhone 16 Max supposedly 6.9" in size. The iPad mini is 8.3" somewhat bigger yet while it can run iPadOS it can't directly access Cellular Voice or Messaging features because of some agreement with Cellular providers only utilize DataSIM with access IP-data services?
You can see at some point in the future iPhones could be like iPads, yet iOS doesn't allow iOS apps to mimic desktop usage as iPadOS does?
I keep wondering when these limitations will cease and Apple bridges the two with a scalable OS that recognized the screen size instead of two separate OS's for particular screen resolutions?
If Apple wants to gain marketshare they have to start thinking ahead about this? Obviously Apple has its hands full with a foldable or collapsible iPhone in the future where screen resolutions can be enlarged or shrunk. Or visa versa a normal size tablet that collapsed is the size of a iPhone Max.
non-Apple examples
5 tablets with phone functionality
There aren't as many options as there were a few years back, but if you're searching for the best recent tablets that can make phone calls – we have them listed right here for you.
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“Charliebird
Whoa whoa whoa, slow down there.
M5 is in June.
M6 is in October.
Why not skip M4 and go straight to M5 or even crazier M6. Maybe the different M generations aren't so different.”
Whoa whoa whoa, slow down there.
M5 is in June.
M6 is in October.
I see your point. I own an M1 12.9” iPad Pro. With what little I’ve gleaned from all the rumors I do have to wonder that if I upgrade will I find it was worth the money, time and and angst?😉
I really hope that the new iPad checks enough feature and performance boxes for all of us.
if I do I’m handing off the M1 iPad Pro to my daughter. she is an ardent MacBook Air (pre-M chip model. I’m not sure if a tablet is going to do it for her. Though she can keep the older MacBook Air And my M1 iPad Pro.
It's not that N3B was too expensive per se, it's that it was a stop gap while the better (and slightly cheaper) N3E was prepared. Given that iPad Pros are typically only updated every 1.5 years, releasing the iPad Pros now with the M3 would mean committing to continuing to manufacture using N3B through fall 2025, and I have my doubts that Apple and TSMC will want to do that. The MBA could easily be updated to the M4 later this fall without too much fuss. I could be wrong though, I guess we won't have to wait long to find out.
Count me in too. Bought the iPad 3 and got shafted.
The A5X was vastly underpowered graphically and the A6X came along with lightning. 6 month later grrrrrrr.
The A5X was vastly underpowered graphically and the A6X came along with lightning. 6 month later grrrrrrr.
I (wishfully) think there will be two: an 11 inch iPad Pro with an M3, and a 13 inch with an M4. The M4 model will be the iPad Pro Max. Unlike the M3 model, it will be able to run iOS and MacOs …![]()
While Apple's upcoming iPad Pro models have been expected to feature the M3 chip for over a year, recent reports have unexpectedly suggested that the new devices will instead feature the as-yet-unannounced M4 chip.
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Last week, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that he now believes there is a "strong possibility" that the upcoming iPad Pro models will be equipped with Apple's next-generation M4 chip, rather than the M3 chip that debuted in the MacBook Pro and iMac six months ago. He said a key new feature of the M4 chip will be an upgraded Neural Engine that boosts performance for AI tasks, and he believes Apple will market the next iPad Pro as an AI-powered device.
Introducing the M4 chip in an iPad and only six months after the previous chip generation would be unprecedented moves. Yet this is not the first time that the new iPad Pro models have been rumored to feature the M4 chip. In March, the chip details of 16 new Apple devices were revealed by a source with a proven track record of sharing accurate information about Apple's plans.
The disclosed technical information contained four identifiers for an unreleased chip that relates to the upcoming 11- and 13-inch iPad Pro models display sizes. This sequence of identifiers suggested that the iPad Pro will contain the M4 chip, rather than the M3. With Gurman now supporting this possibility and the potential of an AI focus, it seems like an increasingly likely eventuality.
If Apple does introduce the M4 chip in the new iPad Pro, its Apple silicon roadmap would appear to be moving faster than expected. It is possible that TSMC's N3E production volume remains low, making it more suitable for a device like the iPad rather than the iPhone or Mac at this point in time.
Apple is expected to announce the new iPad Pro models at its "Let Loose" event on May 7. Do you think the new iPad Pro will contain the M4 chip and why? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Article Link: Will the New iPad Pro Really Have the M4 Chip?
If they can update the MBA after 6 months they could do it with iPad as well 🤔
Must have been said after 200+ comments, but will it have an operating system that is actually capable of taking advantage of its power?!
M4 would make no sense.. but I was wrong before. I actually thought there was no way in hell Apple would put notches on laptops, that there was no need to make screens super ugly just for a minor size bump. So yeah, now I can expect the new iPad Pro with a notch, M4, a built-in kickstand and SD card slot.
This is a more insightful comment than might appear.
While I am often skeptical of Gurman's claims, this is not perhaps as crazy as it sounds.
You may be aware of the recently released Apple Optimization Guide: https://developer.apple.com/download/apple-silicon-cpu-optimization-guide/
There's nothing especially surprising there, mostly confirms (with vastly less detail) the work already published by myself and Dougall Johnson.
BUT
There is one strange, almost unreal, aspect to it in that talks about and gives numbers for the A14, 15, 16 and M1, 2, 3; but it does not talk about the A17. The general conclusion was that A14 -> M1, A15->M2, A17->M3, and A16 was mostly just a hiccup, a kinda of slightly tweaked an optimized A16.
This conclusion may have been incorrect in two senses: that we have assumed a fairly obvious lockstep between A chips and M chips, and that we assumed the M3 was "locked" to the A17.
If one wants to play devils advocate, one can make a number of hypotheses:
(a) The SoCs consist of many IP blocks, and these could be independently modified on different Designs. In other words, the M3 may pick up the (trailing) CPU from the A16 AND the (leading) GPU from the A17. Or the equivalent for the ISP, the media blocks, the ANE, etc.
(b) One thing Apple seems to do (as a fast mover that doesn't want to slip schedule; nVidia BTW does the same thing and have even discussed it publicly to a very small extent) is ship "experimental" versions of certain features on a chip without seriously expecting that they will work 100%. They're there to provide a hardware debugging platform, or for the OS/driver people to start ramping things up, but are hidden behind chicken bits that switch them off for users.
You could imagine an even more aggressive version of this idea, where new functionality is prototyped in A, then M, then M Pro, then M Max; each new set of masks gives you another chance to fix bugs and make small tweaks based on what you learned earlier.
This sort of thing is possible IF (unlike a certain CPU company named I***l, you are able to **** about new functionality until you are 100% certain you have it working and ready to ship...)
Given both these factors, you could imagine a world where, each year, there's some degree of flexibility in M vs A scheduling. The M4 could, for example, include ANE improvements that were prototyped in the A17 (but not activated) and have now, six months later, had the last few hardware bugs fixed in the M4 silicon, and are ready for use.
This may also (to some extent) hook into the missing(?) M3 Ultra.
If you go by the Apple patents then over the past few years Apple have done a lot of work to support the very high end. This is functionality to speed up virtualization, to support a variety of page types (and thus both large pages for Apple use, and alternative OS support), and a new cache protocol to support substantially growing the number of cores and other IP blocks. But we've seen none of this in products.
This could be patents that go nowhere (there are definitely *some* of those, though not many); but my guess is this is tough functionality to get right, so it's been iterated and debugged one mask set at a time, and, again if this is now ready, it may make sense for Apple to make a splash with a set of high-end "M4" products that are not just what we'd expect from an M3 Ultra, but ready to take on one or both of large AMD and large nVidia systems (enough cores, enough memory, enough HPC/server functionality).
Likewise the somewhat disappointing (ie basically none-existent) IPC bump for the M3, even though it definitely has 9-wide (rather than 8-wide) functionality, and probably has somewhat boosted branch prediction – again the most aggressive aspects of the new designs may have been hidden behind chicken bits, being debugged in A17 and M3, and are now ready for actual customer use in a May release M4?
Finally there is the simple issue of TSMC economics. We all know the story of N3B vs N3E. It makes no sense (for Apple or TSMC) to stick with N3B if N3E is materially better (faster, cheaper, or higher yield). So might as well spin out an "M4" that's, in some sense a bug-fixed M3, but which is cheaper to manufacture, and maybe also helps somewhat realign the roadmaps, so that maybe the A19 and M5 ship on the expected schedule in 2025?
Or maybe we switch to a permanent case of M running a few months before A, because, ultimately, a schedule slip in M doesn't affect anything, whereas a schedule slip in A would be a disaster – so M a few months before A acts as a chance to get everything lined up and tested before A? AND it's a lot easier to debug and perfect the new features of the new iPhone if you have essentially the equivalent of that A chip available in a Mac...
I algo got shafted…that thick iPad 3 would also get quite warm, and it was so frustrating to see the iPad 4 announced so soon.
And I also had that experience when I bought my 20” iMac G5 with iSight…and about a month and a half later, they announced the first Intel iMac.
This is going to sound insane, but what if this is the M4, and iPadOS 18 with full Ai won't be here until fall - BUT - Apple throws in the rumored MacOS Lite from two years ago as a "bone" to enhance sales of the ultra expensive Pros until they can be used for their intended purpose. For example, dedicate one of the Stage Manager shelves to virtualized MacOS applications. I know, worse than wishful thinking on my part, but a guy can dream can't he...
If you're thinking it's not going to happen because bringing out the M4 so soon and on an iPad first makes no sense, just remember that we are talking about the same company that brought us this. Things do not have to make sense.
![Apple-Magic-Mouse-Charging_1.jpg]( "Apple-Magic-Mouse-Charging_1.jpg")