The next iPad may have another surprise up its sleeve, according to a new rumor that's floating around online from a leaker with a decent track record. And it's seemingly just the kind of trick that might make Samsung blush, beating the Galaxy Tab S7 at its own game.
So, a bit of context. The last time Apple improved the iPad's latency for the Apple Pencil — the delay between writing on the tablet and your writing appearing on the screen — Apple lowered this gap to a thin 9 milliseconds. And just last week, Samsung announced that the Galaxy Tab S7 and Tab S7 Plus have achieved that same 9ms response time.
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Then, last Wednesday (hours after the Samsung Unpacked event when the Tab S7 was officially) leaker Komiya_kj posted one of the shortest tweets I've ever seen, writing "3ms."
Soon thereafter, a reply from user @teo_abramian asked Komiya if they were talking about the Apple Pencil's latency. And Komiya responded — again with only 3 characters — saying "yes."
If true, this cuts down Samsung's updated latency, shredding it down to a third of that time, for increasingly instantaneous writing.
Hopefully, this improved Apple Pencil speed won't come at a price. Previously, Apple improved its stylus' latency (going from 20ms to 9ms) with 2019's iPadOS 13 update.
If Komiya's leak is going to come to life soon, there's a chance we could see the 3ms Apple Pencil latency as early as this fall. We don't know why Apple would hide that kind of improvement when it was revealing iPadOS 14, but improving the stylus' speed one year after it previously did, in the same manner, makes some sense.
