Rumors of a larger 12-inch iPad have been swirling for months now, but we’ve yet to see any credible parts or renders. That may have just changed, though: renders of a larger rear iPad Pro shell, allegedly from a Foxconn factory.
The leaked images were posted by Nowherelse.fr, a French site that is often on-the-nose with leaked details about upcoming Apple products. The main difference in the picture is it shows a speaker on the top of the iPad, near the home button, which would indicate true stereo sound in the iPad Pro even when placed horizontally. It could even indicate quadrophonic sound, with two speakers on both the top and bottom of the device. (In fact, this is what Nowherelse.fr postulates.)
According to Nowherelse.fr, the leaks come from a Foxconn factory worker, and represent a 3D rendering of the upcoming iPad Pro. They go on to say that the iPad Pro will be between 6.9 and 7.5 millimeters thick, with a screen size between 12.2 and 12.9 inches.
What do you think? Is this the next major addition to the iPad family? Let us know in the comments.
Source: Nowhereelse.fr
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “Is this our first look at the 12-inch iPad Pro?”
What’s the point if it will still be as crippled as any other iPad? I used to be a heavy iPad user since the first iPad. I returned the latest iPad, the iPad Air 2, and it will likely be my last because the browsing experience, especially, is crippled. Nearly all pages reload when you go back to them, select/cut/copy/paste is erratic and essentially broken when working with many text boxes on web sites, and often times Safari can’t even remember where it was at on a web page. You are left at the top of the page and then you have to scroll down to find where you were at. It’s ridiculous.
Ever since iOS 7, iOS has been bug ridden and poorly designed in regards to getting core functionality working properly and easy to use. It’s mindboggling how awful, and broken, the browsing experience is. Do I feel these software issues are going to be fixed. No, I don’t. Not anymore. But what has made me think that I will never use an iPad again is how crippled new iPads become even after just one new iOS version. I am now running iOS 8 on my iPad 4 and the slowdown has been quite dramatic. Similar slowdowns occurred after I upgraded from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Apple is simply obsoleting customers iPads to get them to upgrade every couple of years. Sorry, I’m not paying the price of new computer for a tablet that essentially becomes slow and crippled to the point of being useless after just a couple of years.
You lost a once loyal and enthusiastic iPad user Apple. Try the same nonsense on the Mac side and you will also lose me as a Mac user.
On the one hand I agree with you. iOS needs true multitasking. If an Android phone can get two days of battery life with apps running in the background, I don’t see why an iOS device can’t. Let’s hope that iOS 9 has some pleasant surprises in store in this regard.
On the other hand, I’ve never found updates to dramatically slow down my iOS devices, either iPhones or iPads.
I never mentioned multi-tasking. I was talking about simply being able to browse the Internet. Just one app. I can close all other apps, reset, and reboot, and the browsing experience would still be God awful. It boggles the mind how awful it is. Even with the new iPad Air 2, with just one tab open, nearly every web page reloads. So when you go back to a page it goes to the top of the page, there is a delay and then it moves down to where you left off. Even with the latest version of the iPad those delays add up during a browsing session. On my iPad 4 I am also losing typed content working with just two tabs. How is anyone supposed to do any damn work simply browsing, and in such a manner?
Then you have scroll/selectcut/copy/paste broken in many text boxes on web sites, web site videos that will refuse to get out of full screen view, stuck loading and reloading videos, constant “problem loading page” alerts, keyboard typing lags, and many other bugs.
Then you have the overall slowness of the system. I have an iPad 4 and in 2 years the damn thing is now often painful to use with iOS 8. Even after less than one year my iPad 4 was crippled with iOS 7, and with a browser that could never remember where you were on a web page. Apple never fixed that. They fixed it in iOS 8 and it works as awfully as I described above.
Sometimes I also have to wait like five seconds before the AirPlay menu comes up after I click it’s icon. I mean who designs this crap? At least it’s nice to see that some well known and influential people are now speaking out about the poor software situation.
I used to be such a big fan of Apple’s products but some of the things they are doing the past couple of years is going to push me away from them. Even on the hardware side decisions being made are terrible. Why would Apple in all decency call a near identical product a new version, as they did with the iPad mini 3? Why would they maintain and introduce crippled and very limited products, as they have done with these ridiculous 16GB iOS devices and the new base Mac mini and iMacs? Apple used to give a great value for previous base models. Now you are tricked into actually paying more to get previous levels of value.
These are bad signs for the future if things don’t change real soon.
Firstly, the web page rerendering is a result of the way the multitasking works. It clears the cache and therefore needs to be reloaded, which is why I brought it up.
As for the rest of your comment, it’s all bologna.
What does using just one app, with nothing else running, have to do with multi-tasking?? That’s a rhetorical question, since clearly the answer is nothing.
What’s “bologna” with the rest of my comment? You’re on a tech site dude; don’t expect to be taken seriously with such a silly and empty response.
I see that you don’t understand much about multitasking and how iOS handles background tasks. Too much to explain, so I suggest that you do some reading.
I, too, agree and disagree. I will not disagree that the fit and finish of iOS had gone down significantly since iOS 6. I’ve ran into more bugs under iOS 7 and iOS 8 than I have with iOS versions 1-6. This is a sad truth that I never thought I’d say. In terms of how iOS was, iOS 7 and 8 are disasters, but I still feel like the only other option is just as bad or worse.
Where I disagree is with older hardware. My iPhone 5 actually ran iOS 8 very well. In fact, I was saddened that when I upgraded to an iPhone 6, I didn’t see much improvement in speed and instead I recieved more bugs that hindered my overall experience more than the lesser power in my iPhone 5. I’ve mentioned this to my friends in the past, but I would like Apple to just take a year to fix all of the bugs in iOS. I don’t care if iOS 9 doesn’t come for another year; they just need to fix all of the issues that I know plenty of people are running into. This is the opposite of what Apple used to stand for.
I have no experience with an Android or Windows tablet to replace my iPad. One thing I do know though, at least with the Windows (regular Windows) tablet I would have a normal browsing experience. Don’t get me wrong, if the software issues were truly addressed **and** Apple stopped crippling their iOS devices after even just one year, I would be extremely happy, as I was with my iPad 4 and iOS 6. It was a near perfect mobile computing device. I loved it.
But what Apple is doing now is unsustainable. I am not going to be spending the price of a full computer every two years because of their unethical and lousy attitude and philosophy of generating sales at all costs. If Apple really cared about its iOS customers then it would allow them to stay with older versions of iOS and support those older versions for a reasonable amount of time, like it always did with the Mac. For all these reasons I no longer recommend iPads to people anymore. And then Apple wonders why iPad sales are down.
I also agree with doing away with the nonsense of full version updates every year. I’m sure that greatly contributes to bad software and bugs never being addressed.