Late last month, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg indicated that the next iPad mini would be getting an all-new improvement that hasn’t been seen in any iPad to this day. If we take a look at the iPhone, iPhone models have been water-resistant since the iPhone 7; however, since none of the existing iPad models are water-resistant, if you happen to drop your iPad in a pool, a bathtub, or even a toilet, perhaps, you could end up with a water-damaged iPad and pay some hefty repair fees. According to Gurman, Apple is aiming to redesign the next iPad mini to be water-resistant.
Thanks to its compact size, the iPad mini is certainly the ideal device to read ebooks everywhere, especially to read by the pool. Amazon has had several dedicated ebook readers with its Kindle lineup, many of which are waterproof, so if Apple were to implement a water-resistant design for the iPad mini, it would certainly cannibalize sales of the Kindle readers. Furthermore, the next iPad mini is going to be an even better Kindle alternative as it’s now expected to feature OLED displays along with the iPad Air and MacBook Air.
Currently, iPhone models use adhesives and gaskets to seal their design and to prevent water from going into any holes or open gaps, such as speaker grilles. But with the next iPad mini, Gurman expects Apple to use a different implementation, which is to use vibration-based technology. Although it’s unclear how Apple is going to implement that while preserving the speaker system, I could imagine it would be similar to how Apple makes Apple Watch models water-resistant. According to Apple, Apple Watch models starting with Series 2 have a water-resistance rating of at least 50 meters under ISO standard 22810:2010. Apple engineered those models to be water-resistant by using adhesives and gaskets to close all ingress points except the speaker. The speaker would need air to produce sound, which means water could also get into the speaker, so to remedy this, Apple redesigned the speaker design to allow the speaker itself to reject the water. With that said, I expect Apple to take a similar approach by having the speaker vibrate to eject any water whenever the next iPad mini gets dropped in the pool or any other water-related mishap that the mini tablet may go through.
The iPad mini is in its current 7th-generation with the A17 Pro chip, and it starts at $499 with 128GB of storage. With this breakthrough in design, along with the more advanced OLED technology, Gurman expects the next iPad mini to be priced higher by $100. That would bring the starting price up to $599 – the same entry price point of the iPad Air, and since the iPad Air is also getting OLED, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the next iPad Air follow suit by getting a similar price hike. Make sure to follow us on X or download our app in the App Store for more Apple-related news and content!
