The OLED iPad Pro could launch with an M4 chip

The OLED iPad Pro could launch with an M4 chip

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge

Apple is preparing for its big AI coming out party in this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference; that much you can count on. But apparently, the company is going to start that party a little early with the OLED iPad Pro that it’s expected to unveil on May 7th. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, there’s “a strong possibility” the tablet will launch with an M4 chip and its accompanying neural engine, making it Apple’s “first truly AI-powered device.”

Writing in his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said the company could use its May event to explain “its AI chip strategy without distraction,” freeing it to focus on exactly how the iPad Pro and its other M4 devices will use the company’s AI offerings in iPadOS 18. Those could include on-device Apple-developed features and deeply-integrated chatbots from one or more other companies like Google or OpenAI.

Of course, both of the next Pro models are also expected to get a big OLED upgrade and some new accessories. One of those accessories — the next Apple Pencil — will have haptic feedback, Gurman writes. What would be the point of the haptic feedback? He doesn’t say, but just noodling on the idea here, I could see some fun applications like adding a sort of simulated texture feature when drawing with the Pencil. (Imagine drawing in Photoshop and “feeling” the roughness of the paper!)

I can’t imagine driving a tiny motor all the time would be great for the Pencil’s battery life, though. Maybe that’s where rumors of Apple Pencil support for the Vision Pro come in. Who knows exactly what Apple is planning there if that’s true, but haptics would make sense for helping you feel a little more connected to what you’re doing in virtual space. That’s all in addition to rumors of a new squeeze gesture and magnetic tips that allow users to swap them quickly for different styles for different purposes.

Back to the iPad Pro, though, Gurman has been calling this the most significant redesign of the iPad Pro since 2018, but most people may not see what it has in its guts as part of that. In his reporting today, he only called out the OLED screen as the other noteworthy part of the new tablet.

As much as I think it should do more, I’m pretty OLED-pilled and that might be enough for me to begrudgingly upgrade. But is it enough for others? CAD drawings that showed up in February pointed to a slightly thinner iPad with rounded edges like the iPhone 15 Pro, but for plenty of people, that wasn’t much of a redesign at all, and they might take an iPad Pro with that look the same way.

But Apple making the tablet the point of its AI spear could help answer the question of who the next iPad Pro is for, since, I’d wager, the Venn diagram of people interested in AI and those who want to buy an overpowered tablet probably has decent overlap. But I don’t expect most people will go for the iPad Pro for its AI features when a bigger iPad Air is (probably) sitting right there, (most likely) being much cheaper, though. But hey, maybe that changes once Apple finally tells the story of its on-device AI features, or at least once the reality of those features becomes clear when iPadOS 18 shows up in the fall.