Rumor: iPad 11 to double the RAM for Apple Intelligence
When iPad 11 arrives, Apple’s most affordable tablet should get twice the RAM and the A17 Pro chip to be capable of running the Apple Intelligence suite.
Apple is finally developing an update to its cheapest tablet, called just iPad. The eleventh-generation iPad is coming in 2025 with twice the RAM.
In his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman says iPad 11 will run the A17 Pro chip with 8GB of RAM. To help put things in perspective, the tenth-generation iPad released in October 2022 features the A14 Bionic chip with 4GB of RAM.
Call it the Apple Intelligence effect. Gurman says iPad 11 will support the entire suite of Apple Intelligence features, and 8GB is the minimum to use these AI features, so it’s logical that the next budget iPad would receive the required RAM upgrade.
iPad 11 rumored to run A17 Pro with 8GB of RAM
The A14 chip used in the current tenth-generation iPad was previously seen in iPad Air 4 and iPhone 12 in 2020. It has six processing cores, four GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine capable of performing 11 trillion operations per second to run some AI tasks in a power-friendly manner without burdening the CPU or GPU.
Contrast A14 with A17 Pro, launched in 2023 as Apple’s first silicon built on a 3 nm process. So far, A17 Pro has been used in the iPhone 15 Pro models and iPad mini 7.
A14 features six processing cores (including new high-performance ones) with 8GB of RAM (increased from 6GB in the A16 Pro), a new in-house-designed six-core GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading support that Apple claims is 20% faster and a 16-core Neural Engine running 35 trillion operations per second.
So the next entry-level iPad will run a two-year-old chip (like previous models), but with enough oomph for Apple Intelligence. To make Apple Intelligence run even faster and rely less on the cloud, Apple is also thought to equip all iPhone 17 models launching this year with 12GB of RAM (the iPhone 16 lineup has 8GB of RAM).
Budget iPad with decent hardware
This supposed spec bump could make iPad 11 the best value for money in a while, especially if you don’t care about Apple Intelligence—double the RAM and significantly faster CPU and GPU will make apps and multitasking run smoother.
Gurman says Apple will unveil iPad 11 this spring, meaning around March or April. The new tablet is excepted to have the same overall design as the current tenth-generation model.
He expects a similar spec bump this spring for the iPad Air lineup via the latest M4 chip, refreshed Magic Keyboards for the upcoming iPad 11 and new iPad Airs, and no iPad Pro updates until late 2025 or early 2026.
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