3 Things To Look For From The Next Apple iPad Pro – The Motley Fool



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Once upon a time, the tablet market – led by Apple& # 39; s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad – growing extremely fast. Indeed, the market research firm IDC predicted in 2012 that tablet shipments would increase by 174.5% by 2017 compared to 2012 levels. If these predictions were proven correct, tablet deliveries

This prediction (and similar ones) has not materialized. In fact, in a report released on February 5, 2018, IDC reported that global tablet shipments reached only 163.5 million units in 2017, 6.5 percent less than a year ago.

A girl drawing on an iPad using an apple pencil.

Image source: Apple.

Apple's tablet shipments have not been immune to industry trends. During the 2013 fiscal year, Apple said iPad unit shipments and a business turnover of 71 million units and $ 31.98 billion, respectively. Four years later, during the 2017 fiscal year, Apple reported iPad shipments and revenues of $ 43.75 million and $ 19.22 billion, respectively.

iPad is not Apple's largest company, accounting for about 8.4% of its 2017 fiscal year revenue, but it remains a sizeable source of revenue and a major source of revenue. valuable part of the global ecosystem of Apple products.

Later this year, Apple is expected to launch a new generation of its high-priced iPad Pro tablets. Let's take a closer look at what to expect from them.

A two-stage upgrade of the chip

Apple updated the iPad Pro product line in June 2017. Inside these tablets was a chip called A10X Fusion – an upgraded version of the A10 Fusion that powered the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 More launched in September 2016. A few months later, Apple launched its iPhone 8 series smartphones and iPhone X, powered by the A11 Bionic chip. On September 12, Apple launched its iPhone XS and iPhone XR smartphones, packing the A12 Bionic chip. Apple has never released iPad Pro tablets with, for example, a Bionic A11X chip.

The good news, though, is that the iPad Pro that Apple should launch in the course of the year should actually have a chip that I hope will be marketed as A12X Bionic. In fact, a person using the alias "Longhorn" has actually revealed Apple's internal code name for the chip that will power the next iPad Pro – T8027 tablets.

This means that the future iPad Pro will not only get two generations of newer processors and graphics than A10X Fusion, but they should also integrate the second-generation Apple neural engine of the A12 Bionic. . Apple announced in its press release the announcement of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max that the Neural Engine can "achieve up to 5,000 billion operations per second, against 600 billion for A11 Bionic".

"This allows new features, such as faster aircraft detection for ARKit and new features that use real-time machine learning," read Apple's press release.

Suffice it to say that the next iPad Pro tablets should contain an impressive amount of computing power.

TrueDepth camera and face ID

One of the main features of last year's iPhone X was a depth sensing system that Apple marketed as a TrueDepth camera. This camera system is what activates Face ID's facial recognition feature from the iPhone X, which has supplanted the company's Touch ID technology that had debuted with the iPhone 5 in 2013.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, Apple's next iPad Pro tablets will have support for Face ID (and, as a corollary, the TrueDepth camera system). Gulherme Rambo from 9to5Mac too managed to confirm the inclusion of the face ID in the next iPad Pro tablets. In fact, going further, Steve Troughton-Smith recently tweeted the following:

It makes perfect sense that the next iPad Pro tablets are able to handle the face ID in landscape mode, as I imagine many people drop out and try to unlock their iPads while using them in landscape mode.

No notch, thinner glasses

In a post on 9to5Mac, Rambo reported his discovery of an art tool in iOS 12 Developer beta 5 that "apparently confirms a new iPad without bezel for the fall". "The asset is part of the use of the battery [user interface] and it shows an iPad without a home button and thinner glasses, "explained Rambo.

He also notes that "one thing that is missing in particular in the glyph is a notch". The "notch" that Rambo refers to is cutting up the screens of the iPhone X, iPhone XS / XS Max and iPhone XR smartphones to make room for the TrueDepth camera.

The new iPad Pros seem to offer a dramatic improvement in the aesthetics of the previous generation iPad Pro models.

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