When the baseline iPad (10th generation) was introduced back in October 2022, it brought a feature that was the first on any iPad. It moved the front-facing camera to the landscape side of the iPad. This means that when you use that iPad in landscape mode or with a Magic Keyboard Folio, the camera will be facing directly at you as opposed to on the side. This makes you appear more natural in FaceTime calls, Zoom meetings, etc. Before the 10th-generation iPad, all the iPad models (except the original) had a front-facing camera on the portrait side. To this day, it has been the only iPad in the lineup to have a landscape camera as Apple didn’t introduce any new iPad models last year.
We’re expecting a major refresh for the iPad Pro, and several lines of code in iPadOS 17.4 have referenced the possibility of a landscape camera: “During ”ŒFace ID”Œ setup, ”ŒiPad”Œ needs to be in the landscape with the camera at the top of the screen:”
Not only the next iPad Pro will receive this change, but also, it may also be coming to the next iPad Air as well, according to Instant Digital. This will be a welcome change to see the feature make its way to the mid-tier tablet offering as previous CAD renders indicated otherwise.
If we take a look at the iPad 10, the reason that Apple was able to move the camera to the landscape side was that there was no magnetic connector for the Apple Pencil (2nd generation) that would take up that space. So Apple made the iPad 10 compatible with the both first-generation Apple Pencil and the Apple Pencil (USB-C) that was introduced last October.
Both the current models of the iPad Air and iPad Pro have the magnetic charger for the Apple Pencil 2 on the side, so that’s why Apple hasn’t been able to move the camera to that side. If Apple were to move the camera to the new position on both models, then Apple would likely introduce a new model of the Apple Pencil that will still charge with the new iPads in some way as several references of code have indicated a new incoming model.
We’ll likely see the announcement of both the upcoming iPad Air and iPad Pro as soon as this month. You can read about what we expect for the next iPad Air.
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