Apple suddenly announced the iPad mini 7 on Tuesday. We knew an update was coming for Apple’s smallest iPad, but it was expected that Apple would hold some sort of event to announce the 2024 iPad mini and new M4 Macs. These are also expected to be available by the end of October or early next year. month.
Meanwhile, the iPad mini 7 is available for pre-order and is expected to ship to buyers by next week. The good news is not only that you’ll get a much more powerful iPad mini version that can handle Apple Intelligence once the software is ready. A look at the iPad mini 7 shows that the M4 MacBook Pro leaks we’ve seen over the past few weeks have shown the real device.
There was little reason to doubt the authenticity of the M4 MacBook Pro, which was already sold on the Russian black market. There was an issue of wallpaper selection for the M4 MacBook Pro, but given all the other evidence, it wasn’t important enough. The iPad mini 7 essentially shows Apple doing something unexpected and reusing wallpapers on brand new products.
As shown in the comparison below, the official name of iPad mini 7 is iPad mini (A17 Pro). That’s the tablet’s biggest upgrade. It is equipped with the iPhone 15 Pro chip needed to run Apple Intelligence features. This also means that the tablet has 8GB of RAM, which is also a nice upgrade.
Add in 128GB of base storage and the same $499 starting price, and the iPad mini 7 becomes almost a smaller iPad Pro. Indeed, it’s a small iPad Air.
If you compare Apple’s latest mini-tablets on Apple’s site, you’ll see that the two devices are otherwise identical. This includes the default wallpaper chosen by Apple as a marketing image.
iPad mini 7 uses the same wallpaper as its predecessor. It seems like an odd choice, but then again, Apple has made small upgrades to the mini in the grand scheme of things. Yes, we expect a significant performance improvement. But essentially, that’s all we get.
Apple seems to think that’s not enough to qualify you to change your wallpaper. Given what we’ve seen in these hands-on videos, Apple will likely do the same with the M4 MacBook Pro.
The M4 MacBook Pro’s box and display wallpaper were the only thing that made people question the authenticity of the leak. Why would Apple reuse the same marketing image for its next-generation device, which is supposed to have significantly better performance? So why not?
Having seen these leaks, I say they are very convincing. The M4 MacBook Pro looks like the real deal, and benchmarks run on the device confirmed that idea. When a second unboxing video was released from Russia, the wallpaper seemed unimportant.
Now that the iPad mini 7 has arrived, it’s clear that Apple will reuse marketing images for some of its products if necessary.
Like the iPad mini 7, the base M4 MacBook Pro looks almost identical to its predecessor, aside from an additional USB-C port. This is the same as the M3 Pro and M3 Max MacBook Pro, which each have three Thunderbolt ports. Also, the 2024 MacBook Pro’s biggest upgrade is in terms of specs. The base model has a base M4 chip with 16GB of RAM.
Finally, the iPad mini 7 launch hints that there may not be an Apple media event later this month. Instead, the M4 Mac will likely be announced via a press release, similar to the iPad mini 7.
