In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman warns that 2023 will be a “light year” for iPad releases… as in a year that will bring spec bumps rather than astronomical leaps. However, next year will be a different matter, he says, with a “major revamp” coming for the iPad Pro.
According to Gurman, spring 2024 will “bring an updated design and OLED displays” to the iPad Pro range for the first time. This is big (and probably too late) news. Apple hasn’t changed the design of the Pro significantly since 2018, when it removed the Home button, squared the edges and curved the screen corners. If you’re not keeping track, that’s four generations in a row that the company has rolled out premium tablets that are largely indistinguishable.
We don’t know what the new design will look like, but previous rumors suggested the addition of a glass back, which in turn could mean MagSafe wireless charging. It’s also possible that Apple will increase the maximum screen size of the Pro from the current 12.9 inches to something close to 14 or even 16 inches. Some think that would be a really bad idea, but it would certainly be interesting.
As for the OLED screen upgrade, that’s also been expected for a while. Colorful, high-contrast OLED screen technology came to Apple’s smartphones with the launch of the iPhone X way back in 2017 (and was offered, albeit in a much smaller form, on the Apple Watch two years before that), but is still didn’t appear on even Apple’s most expensive tablets. Last month, however, a renowned display industry analyst suggested it could finally happen in 2024, matching Gurman’s forecast.
Promising news for iPad Pro customers. But the coming year doesn’t look nearly as nice. As for the standard iPad, the mini, and the iPad Air, Gurman says there won’t be any major updates in 2023. And the iPad Pro “definitely isn’t getting anything noteworthy this year.”
We’d love to see Gurman wrong about iPads in 2023, but he has a solid track record of predictions. In other words, brace yourself for a boring year and we’ll see you on the other side of the calendar.
