Guess what the next iPad Pro will have? MiniLED screen, 5G, and two updates a year?

Sina Digital News reported on the morning of May 18 that although Apple just updated the iPad Pro in March, many people have begun to look forward to the next update. According to rumors, the next-generation iPad Pro will be equipped with 5G, mini LED display technology, etc. Foreign media 9to5Mac has summarized these rumors, from which we can roughly guess what the next-generation iPad will look like.

Apple updated the iPad Pro in March, focusing mainly on upgraded cameras and a new Magic Keyboard - the former is mainly for AR experiences brought by the LiDAR scanner, while the latter is also available for the 2018 iPad Pro. The processor is an A12z Bionic chip and 6GB of memory.

That’s why many people think this year’s update is just a minor one, and expect more radical changes in 2021.

Screen

Most people in the industry believe that the next generation iPad Pro will adopt mini LED display technology. Of course, this is also judged from the fact that the entire industry is actively promoting this new display technology.

Mini LED will be a big visible change

Mini LED is expected to bring various improvements, including improved display quality and longer battery life.

The back of the LCD panel uses LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, to light up the liquid crystals in the LCD to emit different colors. Mini LEDs, on the other hand, refer to diodes that are less than 0.2 mm in size. Compared to traditional LCDs, panel lights using mini-LEDs use more LEDs, which means there are more dimming zones to choose from. Traditional displays may use hundreds of LEDs, but mini-LED displays may have more than a thousand.

There have even been rumors that Apple is exploring mini-LED displays that use 10,000 LEDs, each less than 200 microns. Because there are more LEDs and more dimming zones, mini LED displays can provide deeper or darker blacks, higher brightness, richer colors, and greater contrast.

It is expected that the size of the iPad Pro display will remain unchanged: 11-inch and 12.9-inch variants, support for True Tone display, 120Hz dynamic refresh rate, etc.

And the iPad Pro may not be the only Apple device that switches to mini LED. There are reports that Mac computers may also add mini LED, and other iPad models will follow suit. Of course, the flagship will use it first.

5G

Just like the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro coming later this year, the next-generation iPad Pro will also support 5G connectivity.

This means that iPad Pro supports 5G technologies such as sub-6GHz and millimeter wave, so as to adapt to the 5G networks in different countries or regions.

5G should be relatively certain

Apple is expected to use Qualcomm's baseband chips for its 5G products. Apple is also developing its own in-house 5G modem, but it is not expected to be available until at least 2022.

Configuration

The next iPad Pro update will bring an even more significant performance boost. The latest 2020 iPad Pro features the A12Z Bionic processor, which is technically the same chip as the A12X Bionic processor, but with an additional GPU.

Apple's next iPad Pro update is expected to be powered by the upcoming A14 processor using a 5nm process. According to recent supply chain reports, Apple's partner TSMC plans to start producing the A14 processor using the new 5nm process in the second quarter. It will first be used in the iPhone 12 later this year, followed by the new iPad Pro in 2021.

A14 can also be considered a "regular update"

Many people believe that this chip will make the iPhone 12 as powerful as the 15-inch MacBook Pro (of course, they are different platforms). These improvements are mainly due to the 5nm manufacturing process. In addition, if nothing unexpected happens, the latest 2020 iPad Pro models will also offer 6GB of RAM.

price

Currently, the iPad Pro 11-inch starts at $799 and the 12.9-inch starts at $999. The addition of hardware such as 5G and mni-LED is expected to increase the price.

As for the release date, it has been reported that the next-generation iPad Pro version will be released later this year, which is likely to make the iPad "updated twice a year" again. It is not clear whether the new crown epidemic will affect the supply chain, because there are too many uncertainties caused by the epidemic.