iPad Pro 2 release date rumours UK | iPad Pro 2 specs, UK price, new features: Gene Munster predicts ‘Westworld’-style foldable iPad

The iPad Pro 2 launch is an exciting prospect – but we may have to wait a bit longer. Apple made a splash in September 2015 when it unveiled its first giant tablet: a device known at the time only as the iPad Pro and rocking a blockbuster 12.9-inch screen, quad speakers and a super-quick processor chip. The following March a smaller and frankly better 9.7-inch version of the iPad Pro came out, creating mild naming complications (we now call them the iPad Pro 12.9 and iPad Pro 9.7 respectively) and kindling a degree of regret in the hearts of early adopters.

But we are now looking ahead to the future of the iPad Pro line. When will Apple release the iPad Pro 2, and what new features and design changes will this product incorporate? Will there be separate 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch editions of the iPad Pro 2 – will there even be a 7.9-inch model, a sort of iPad Pro mini, or a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro 2?

Our iPad Pro 2 release date & new features rumour roundup weighs up all the clues, hints and evidence about the new iPad Pro models, as well as our wishlist of new features that are missing from the current generation of iPad Pro hardware. Check back regularly for the latest iPad Pro 2 rumours.

Updated, 14 December 2016, with a rumour of a folding iPad; on 7 Dec, to discuss rumours about the iPad Pro 2’s design – that it will be thicker than the iPad Pro and feature mostly bezel-free screens and no Home button; and on 30 Nov, with rumours about a new inbetweener 10.5in iPad.

Read next: iPad buying guide 2016/2017 | Best cheap iPad Pro deals UK

iPad Pro 2 release date rumours UK: Launch date

When will the next iPad Pro come out in the UK? March 2017, most likely.

During Apple’s September 2016 event, there was no mention of the iPad line (focusing instead on the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2), while its October event showcased a smart if costly new MacBook Pro. If it had a new iPad Pro up its sleeve, surely Apple could have found time at one of these events to mention it… which suggests to us that the iPad Pro 2 is being held back until next year. And March is generally when Apple holds its first event of the year.

(After the MacBook Pro launch, there were rumours of a third autumn launch event or product refresh from Apple, focusing on the Mac Pro line and potentially squeezing in some iPads at the same time. It’s pretty clear now that this isn’t going to happen.)

iPad Pro 2 release: One iPad launch event, or two?

As with the two strands of iPhone models – the mid-size iPhone 7 and large-screen iPhone 7 Plus, both launched in September 2016, and the smaller iPhone SE, released in March 2016 – there are two schools of thought here. Either Apple will unify the two Pro brands into a single annual update event, or it will continue to update half the models in spring and the other half in autumn.

Both theories have down sides. If, as now looks likely, Apple does a full refresh (9.7-in and 12.9-inch together) in March 2017, then the current hardware will be starting to feel old before then – the original Pro will be 18 months old, which is a long time to be the most expensive tablet on Apple’s books. Then again, the company would have been in almost as tricky a position if it did a full refresh in September, presumably upsetting a bunch of people who just bought new devices. Three major iPad updates in the space of 12 months might just be taking the mickey.

There’s also something a bit messy, a bit un-Apple, about having two press event to announce what would essentially amount to two SKUs of the same product line. I think the company will want to keep things simple.

A final thought, however, is that people don’t update their iPads as often as their iPhones: only 6 percent of the respondents to our poll said they get a new iPad every year.

It’s therefore debatable whether Apple actually needs to bring out new iPads this often. It could probably switch to a biennial release schedule without causing much of a problem.

Read next: iPad Air 3 rumours | iPad mini 5 rumours | Apple Pencil 2 rumours

iPad Pro 2 release date rumours UK: New 10.5-inch iPad Pro

The latest rumour suggests that Apple won’t update its iPad Pro line-up again in 2016, but will make up for this in 2017 by launching a new size.

Ming-Chi Kuo, a market analyst with a strong track record, has published a report making predictions about Apple’s moves over the next couple of years. Kuo is cautious in his iPad sales predictions – cutting a previous estimate of 45 to 50 million for the year to 35 to 40 million, partly because of a lack of new products in the near term: despite a comparatively strong performance in Q3 2016, iPad sales remain flat – but argues that Apple will sell three sizes of iPad Pro. There will be a 12.9-inch Pro, a 9.7-inch Pro and a new 10.5-inch Pro, Kuo predicts, with the smallest offered as a low-cost option with a lower-powered processor as well as a smaller screen.

Kuo’s reasoning is that an ‘inbetweener’ 10.5-inch iPad Pro would sell well to the education and business sectors:

“If the iPad comes in a larger size, such as a 10.5-inch model, we believe it will be helpful to bid for tenders within the commercial and education markets. As a result, we expect Apple to launch a 10.5-inch iPad Pro in 2017.”

These three iPad sizes don’t include the 7.9-inch form factor of the iPad mini. Apple could continue to sell the mini alongside the three iPad Pros, but the success of the iPhone 6 Plus and the upcoming launch of the iPhone 7 Plus, Apple may feel that this area is covered by its phablet offerings. But we’ll discuss the prospects of an ‘iPad Pro mini’ in the next section.

This new 10.5in or even 10.9in size is rumoured to come with a bezel-free design, as it will accommodate the larger screen in a smaller form-factor. This might potentially see the end of the home button.

iPad Pro 2 release date rumours UK: Will there be an iPad Pro mini?

Following the launch of the 9.7-inch Pro it’s now firmly established that the Pro brand doesn’t just refer to Apple’s biggest tablets – instead, it refers to a set of specs and features and, in a way that’s hard to define, any tablet that sits at the top of Apple’s range. If we accept that a 9.7-inch tablet can be an iPad Pro, could we get a 7.9-inch Pro as well?

The highly respected securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks so. In a recent report, Kuo predicted that there would be no more iPad updates in 2016, but that multiple new iPads would be launched in 2017. These will include a new inbetweener 10.5-inch iPad Pro, he reckons (as we discuss in the section above); and also a 7.9-inch iPad Pro, displacing the iPad mini line. We could end up in a situation where every current iPad is branded as an iPad Pro, which would be a bit strange.

The truth is that there’s no concrete reason why there can’t be a 7.9-inch iPad Pro 2, but for various reasons we still don’t expect Apple to do this. For one thing, unlike the Air line-up, the minis are still being updated; the mini 4 came out at the same event as the first iPad Pro, which suggests that Apple plans to keep both brands going at the same time. And besides, the Pro brand has always existed in opposition to a lower-end alternative: the MacBook Pro sits opposite the MacBook Air (and plain MacBook); the Mac Pro opposite the iMac; and so on. Apple can’t just call every tablet a Pro.

We’re starting to suspect that the Air brand may be phased out across Apple’s laptop and tablet departments, but there still needs to be two lines left in each of these areas. Apple still sell a MacBook Pro and a 12-inch MacBook, we expect; in the same way, we’d expect there to be iPad Pro models and iPad mini models.

To read more about the iPad mini 5 – or the iPad Pro mini – then take a look at our iPad mini 5 rumour roundup.

iPad Pro 2 release date rumours UK: Design

What design changes can we expect from the new iPad Pro 2?

Folding iPad

We’ll start with the most out-there rumour. Analyst Gene Munster – he of the relentless and widely mocked ‘Apple television’ predictions, who in my opinion was somewhat vindicated when it turned out that Apple had been developing a telly but gave up on the plan – has predicted that Apple is going to make a foldable iPad.

The prediction, reported by Apple Must, cites recent patent activity that shows Apple is exploring the idea of a foldable iPhone, and extrapolates this concept to the tablet sphere (where, because of the larger form factor of the devices, a folding design probably makes more sense).

The timing of the prediction is interesting, coming as it does shortly after the end of the first series of Westworld, HBO’s violent and disorienting TV series based on the 1970s Yul Brynner film of the same name. In Westworld, the human programmers who set the behaviours and personalities of the park’s western-themed android inhabitants do all their programming on slick foldable tablets. The foldable tablet designs on the show make a lot of sense and look fantastic. (The idea of programmers working on tablets seems less plausible.)

Bezel-free screen

Macotakara, a Japanese-language Apple site, predicts that the iPad Pro 2 will have a largely bezel-free screen and no Home button, citing sources in Taiwan.

The bezel (the non-screen area around the edge of the screen on an iPad, which you hold while using the device) will apparently be removed from the bottom of the iPad Pro, meaning the Home button will disappear, and Touch ID will have to be integrated into the screen itself. Oddly, the site predicts that the bezel will remain at the top of the iPad Pro 2, and will continue to house the front-facing FaceTime camera.

Thicker design

Macotakara also believes that the 12.9-inch model of the iPad Pro 2 will be 3mm thicker than its predecessor, and says the middle-size model of the iPad Pro will have a 10.9-inch screen, not 10.5-inch as has been rumoured elsewhere.

iPad Pro 2 release date rumours UK: Leaked photos

AppleInsider has published two photos, ostensibly showing the iPad Pro 2, that were sent into the site by an anonymous reader.

The images, like most Apple hardware leaks, are said to originate from the Asian supply chain; in this case it’s said to be an employee at a Chinese supplier who has taken and leaked the photos.

Both photos show the same onscreen imagery – the General > About tab of the Settings app, chosen presumably because it includes model number designations and other details that can corroborate the photo’s legitimacy. (But, as AppleInsider observes, such details are not difficult to spoof, so the photos may yet be fake.)

The About page says the depicted iPad is model MH1C2CD/F: that certainly sounds right, since that designation hasn’t been given to any publicly known iPads, while broadly following the conventions of earlier Pro models. (The 128GB cellular 12.9-inch iPad Pro, for instance, is designated ML3K2B/A. By contrast, the iPad Air 2 uses a slightly different format: the 128GB cellular model is MH332B/A.)

Although, we should note that spoofing the model number can be changed relatively easily. More so, the model shows only 12GB of available storage – this can however be a test version, where 12GB of internal storage is more than sufficient.

As one would expect, the depicted iPad is running a version of iOS 10 – you can tell because Siri gets its own top-level tab in the Settings app rather than a sub-category within General.

Unfortunately – or conveniently, if you’re cynical – it’s virtually impossible to deduce anything else about the device from the shots, which don’t show hardware ports or buttons, and have nothing else in frame with which to compare size of screen and so on. About all this tells us is that a new iPad Pro is probably on its way in the next few months.

Once we know more information or sent more details on the screenshots we will update this article.

iPad Pro 2 rumours: New features wishlist

The iPad Pro tablets are great, but they’re not perfect. Here are a few new features and design tweaks we’d like to see in the second-gen iPad Pro.

iPad Pro 2 wishlist: Bring the 9.7in Pro’s new features across to the 12.9in model

An issue we’ve addressed several times across this article concerns the disappointment felt by a number of 12.9-inch iPad Pro owners when the cheaper and in many respects better 9.7-inch iPad Pro was launched six months later. So the first thing we’d ask for is consistency. To achieve this the larger Pro model needs to get:

• A 12-megapixel rear-facing camera (up from 8Mp)
• A 5Mp front-facing camera (up from 1.2Mp)
• 4K video recording
• Live Photos
• Display with True Tone and ‘wide colour’
• A 32GB cellular buying option
• A pink colour option

iPad Pro 2 wishlist: Better keyboard accessory (for 9.7-inch model)

The Pros are explicitly aimed at business users, and for this reason it was critical to get some good keyboard accessories.

Apple’s own Smart Keyboard is a strong offering in the larger size – even though it’s expensive, and Macworld is divided on the issue of whether Logitech’s less attractive Create keyboard offers a better typing experience – but the 9.7-inch version is a different matter. As a result of the smaller keys typing accuracy is weaker; the lower weight means it feels less satisfying under the fingers. (The design looks great, however, and is magnificently slim and light from a portability point of view. And the Smart Connector – and the fact that you never have to worry about battery life – is wonderful too.)

We feel that Apple needs to create – or persuade a third-party accessory maker to create – a 9.7-inch keyboard you can really type on. And this may involve some compromises. It may need to have a foldout design (sounds ugly, right?) so that it could fit in larger keys. It might need to be heavier (thereby reducing portability) in order to feel better and reduce movement on the desk. But whatever happens, the smaller Pro needs an updated accessory line-up in order to compete as a business tool.

[Source:-Macworld]