The iPad 11 has been tipped by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg to get a big performance upgrade that will also unlock Apple Intelligence features for the most basic Apple tablet.
That upgrade will come courtesy of the use of an A17 Pro chip, first seen in the iPhone 15 Pro and also used in the latest iPad mini. As well as giving a raw performance improvement over the A14 chip seen in the iPad 10th gen (used originally in the iPhone 12), the A17 Pro should also come with 8GB of RAM, according to Gurman. That would double the 4GB capacity in the current basic iPad.
Despite the big jump in power, the use of an iPhone chip would still keep this new iPad and the iPad mini in a lower performance tier than the iPad Air or iPad Pro, which use the same M2 and M4 chips found in recent Macs and MacBooks.
Apple Intelligence becomes more accessible
Apple Intelligence is still slowly rolling out features, but many are already available. We’d expect staple features like summarising and transcribing text, making tweaks to your writing with Writing Tools and image editing with Genmoji, Image Playground and Clean Up to all be present on the new iPad if it uses the A17 Pro chip. But it's also possible that currently unreleased but promised features like Personal Context may be released in time for its launch.
This is notable since all other Apple Intelligence-compatible devices cost more money than the $349 that the current iPad retails for. The cheapest Mac, the Mac mini M4, starts at $499 and needs you to provide a screen, keyboard and mouse. Meanwhile the cheapest iPhone is the $799 iPhone 16. This could be a big step in rolling out these AI features to more people than just keen early adopters.
The iPad 11's already been tipped to launch early this year, presumably at a Apple spring event rather than via a simple online announcement. The iPhone SE 4 is also thought to be arriving at the same time, plus a revised iPad Air and cheaper Magic Keyboard accessories to go with the new tablets.
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