The OLED iPad Pro could launch with an M4 chip

Writing in your To connect newsletter today, Gurman said the company could use its May event to explain “its distraction-free AI chip strategy,” freeing it to focus exactly as The iPad Pro and its other M4 devices will use the company’s AI offerings in iPadOS 18. This could include Apple-developed features on the device and deeply integrated chatbots from one or more companies like Google or OpenAI.

Of course, both upcoming Pro models are also expected to receive a major OLED upgrade and some new accessories. One of these accessories – the upcoming Apple Pencil – will have haptic feedback, Gurman writes. What would be the purpose of haptic feedback? He doesn’t say, but just thinking about 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 that driving a tiny motor all the time would be great for the Pencil’s battery life. Maybe that’s where Apple Pencil support rumors for Vision Pro in between. Who knows exactly what Apple is planning there if that’s true, but haptics would make sense to help you feel a little more connected to what you’re doing in virtual space. This is all in addition to rumors of a new squeezing gesture It is magnetic tips which allow users to quickly swap them out for different styles for different purposes.

Getting back to the iPad Pro, though, Gurman has been calling this the most significant redesign of the iPad Pro since 2018, but most people might not see what it has in its guts as part of that. In his report today, he only highlighted the OLED screen as another noteworthy part of the new tablet.

But Apple making the tablet the tip of its AI spear could help answer the question of who the next iPad Pro will be for, since, I’d wager, the Venn diagram of people interested in AI and those who want to buy a tablet superpowered probably has decent overlap. But I don’t expect most people to opt for the iPad Pro for its AI capabilities when a larger iPad Air is (probably) out there, (probably) being much cheaper. But hey, maybe that will change when Apple finally tells the story of its on-device AI features, or at least when the reality of those features becomes clear when iPadOS 18 appears in the fall.