In Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman’s weekly edition of his “Power On” newsletter, he claimed that Apple is planning to launch not one, but two, updated iPads in the not-too-distant future. Those would be the base iPad and the iPad Air. Now, bear in mind that we shouldn’t expect any drastic redesigns. Still, the upcoming spec bumps should be more than solid for both of those models, especially for the base iPad. Here’s why.
The current base iPad features the A16 chip with 6GB of RAM, which makes this iPad the only model in today’s iPad lineup to not support Apple Intelligence. In fact, all the iPhone models and Mac models that Apple currently offers support Apple Intelligence. Additionally, since the A16 is based on the older 5nm process, it does not support hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading for more realistic graphics, particularly in gaming. The A18 chip (based on the improved 3nm process) that’s now rumored to come to the base iPad will finally bring these features to the base iPad for the very first time. Since the current base iPad uses the binned A16 chip, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next base iPad would have some binned variant of the A18 chip, particularly to save production costs.
For the iPad Air, it’s expected to feature the M4 chip, as the higher-end iPad Pro features the M5 chip. So it would make sense for the iPad Air to use the previous generation M-series chip. The current iPad Air actually uses a binned M3 chip with a 9-core GPU, so it’s likely that the next iPad Air could use a binned M4 chip as well.
Later this year, the only iPad that will see a bigger upgrade will be the iPad mini, which is rumored to transition to OLED technology. The iPad continues to be one of Apple’s most popular products as it saw strong sales over the holiday season, particularly with both the entry-level model, which provides the best value, and iPadOS 26. The future of the iPad looks promising enough with the upcoming refreshes this year, and we could see the upcoming iPad (A18) and iPad Air (M4) as early as March.
