New iPad Pro 2018 is Rumored to Have a Touch Keyboard

2018 iPad Pro X Will Be Huge! [Video]

Video uploaded by EverythingApplePro E A P on January 11, 2018.

New iPad Pro 2018 (3rd generation or iPad X) is Rumored to Have a Touch Keyboard

This year we are going to meet the third generation of iPad Pros (or the iPad Pro 3). The 12.9 and 10.5-inch models were introduced last June and got a lot of criticism for their size, price and accessories. They looked more like an answer to Windows Surface hybrids than an independent line-up of products.

Now it seems, Apple is going to roll out an even more controversial tablet than ever. Allegedly, it is going to get the touch keyboard, the Face ID and the edgeless display.

At the end of February 2018, identifiers of two models running iOS 11 surfaced. They are A1954 and A1893. The tablets with these identifiers were registered with the Eurasian commission database. Nevertheless, it doesn’t give us any clue as to what the announcement date will be.

The hardware specs haven’t leaked either. Yet, knowing the pattern Apple followed with wearables, we can take a guess.

Some features like an edgeless display and Face ID can be brought across from the iPhone X. While the face identification is fine for a tablet, an edgeless display might be a pain, because we need edges for a more comfortable grip. Then again, there’s the problem of tablet orientation. With the fingerprint sensor I can activate my iPad both in portrait and in landscape orientation. Would the TrueDepth cam work both ways? The implementation of this feature can require more than a few changes in the software.

Apple’s rumored iPad Pro with Face ID will likely be released in the second quarter of 2018, according to Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang.

Another strange feature is the touch keyboard. This February, Apple patented the “Dual display equipment with enhanced visibility and suppressed reflections”. There are two variants: the permanent one on hinges and the detachable one. (Wow, Cupertino borrowed some pages from Microsoft’s book!)

Nevertheless, I personally doubt we’ll see the touch keyboard this year if we ever will. First of all, it’s not practical. Secondly, there’s a great distance between a patent and a production.

The thing we can be 100% sure about is the chip. Every iPad Pro model was given the modified version of the iPhone’s chip with an “X” in its name. Therefore, the 12.9-inch 1G and 9.7-inch iPad Pros got the 64-bit Apple A9X and the Apple M9 motion coprocessor. The 12.9-inch 2G and 10.5-inch models feature the 64-bit Apple A10X with the Apple M10 motion coprocessor. The clock speed grew from 2.26 GHz (2.16 GHz for the 9.7-inch model) to 2.39 GHz and the number of cores was blown from two to six.

iPad Pro 2018 will likely get the A11X Bionic chip, a boosted variant of the A11 the iPhone X feature now.

The smaller iterations of iPad Pro could boast just 2 GB LPDDR4 operation memory while the top tablets of the line-up was doubled.

We can guess that the iPad Pro 2 can get as many as 4 or 6 GB of SDRAM.

The bottom line is that storage capacity might also go up to 64 GB, because 32 GB is not enough nowadays.

I wrote ‘might’ because the rumor has it that Apple is going to significantly drop the prices for the Pro family of tablets. The sources promise the price to soar around $300 for the bottom-line model without FaceID and with a smaller screen.

Links

• Rumor claims Apple at work on 11-inch iPad Pro, no new iPhones in first half of 2018 – AppleInsider.
• Sell your used iPad Pro for cash – iGotOffer
• Everything About Apple’s Products – The complete guide to all Apple consumer electronic products, including technical specifications, identifiers and other valuable information.