According to a new report by Bloomberg, Cupertino is working on a completely redesigned 2018 Apple iPad that will probably be the Pro model.
If the Bloomberg report is to be believed, the said 2018 Apple iPad Pro will ditch the popular home button, just like it happened on the iPhone X. This means that it will come with slimmer bezels than usual and similar to the X, you will get Face ID for authentication purposes. Since this feature will let you open the iPad with a facial scan, there won’t be the need of having the Touch ID.
Since it’s 2010 introduction, this will be the first major design overhaul and if anything, the company is looking to align its products with what are now the new standards in the mobile industry. Since this is expected to be the 2018 Apple iPad Pro, it will also represent the first major design change since the debut of the Pro lineup in 2015.
Even though the report seems to suggest that the 2018 Apple iPad will adopt most of the features used on the iPhone X, Bloomberg says that this will not be true for everything, among them the OLED panel. As it is, the said iPad Pro will stick to an LCD panel, probably due to the supply constraints the company is still facing with respect to OLED panels. While Samsung is capable of serving Apple’s OLED needs for the iPad Pro, financial and technical barriers mean that it won’t be possible for Apple to adopt this display technology at this point in time.
The new iPad will also come with a faster processor and a custom Apple GPU as well as a new version of the Apple Pencil. The Pencil will receive new “software tools” as well, but the wait could be long before you can get your hands on this beauty. According to Bloomberg, the 2018 Apple iPad Pro should be unveiled in June 2018, a year from the last time the iPad Pro lineup was updated, which happened at the WWDC event in June 2017.