Another day, another opportunity to rate my 2025 Apple predictions!

iPad

Here’s what I predicted would happen with the base iPad this year:

I fully expect to see the 11th gen iPad in 2025, and I think it will come with a jump to the A17 Pro or M1 processor, enabling Apple Intelligence. I have a sneaking suspicion that the base storage will remain at 64GB, which will (rightly) be a point of contention in reviews of the product. I also expect it to get support for the Apple Pencil Pro, completing Apple’s transition from Pencil chaos to a perfectly clean lineup where all iPads work with “the good Pencil” and “the better Pencil.” I expect the colors to shift a little but the rest of the physical specs, including the display, to remain basically the same.

Oh man, I was so close on this one! I am surprised to see the A16 in here since that doesn’t give the device Apple Intelligence. I really thought that Apple was done making new computers without it, but I guess not. I was happy to see the base storage go to 128GB, which I think is tolerable in a way that 64GB was hilariously not. I missed on the Pencil support by a bit in a way I’ll get into more down below, and while I nailed that the screen and all other specs besides the SoC would remain the same as before, I was technically wrong about the colors since they seem to be literally identical (which is fine, I’m not bothered by this).

Personally, this isn’t the iPad for me, of course. My wife uses the outgoing model every couple days to play a game or two, and she’s fine with it. Her biggest complaint is that the Apple Pencil USB-C doesn’t magnetically charge (although it does magnetically attach pretty well), and this new model doesn’t address that concern. In fact, the new iPad supports the same Apple Pencils as the last model, meaning those with a 1st generation Apple Pencil from many years ago can keep using one. I did hope that they would add Pencil Pro support so that they could say any Pencil they currently sell in stores works with every iPad, but honestly I get why this is the one iPad where that support is least important. Credit where it’s due, I gave Apple shit a couple years ago when their Apple Pencil story was an absolute mess, and they’ve fixed it to the point that anyone complaining about this is just looking for trouble.

My one thing I hope they get down to this model next time is a laminated display. The resolution is fine and 60Hz is not ideal but okay, but if you haven’t used a non-laminated display in a long time, you probably forgot how terrible it looks.

iPad Air

Here’s what I said about the iPad Air in 2025:

I also feel like the Air is going to take the year off as the next chip upgrade would probably be to the M4 (M3 never made it to the iPad line, so I think Apple is just moving on from this generation) and that would bring it in line with the Pros which I don’t see happening. If we see a Pro update in the first half of the year, then I think the chances of a new Air rise quite a bit for the fall.

Well, I got this one wrong in every way possible. This assumption was based on my impression that the M3 generation of chips was something Apple was trying to move away from pretty quickly, but I guess it gets one more hurrah in the iPad Air.

But other than the chip upgrade, there’s literally nothing different about this iPad Air from the one that came before. Same displays, same price, same storage, same Pencils, same cameras, same everything.

Well, I take that back, the new 13” iPad Air is 1g lighter than the old one, and the 11” model is a massive 2g lighter. You know the differences are slight when I’m mentioning a 1g weight difference!

Oh, and there’s a new Magic Keyboard specifically for the iPad Air. This is a change from previous generations when the Air and Pro lines shared the same Magic Keyboard support, and honestly I think it’s a bummer that they’ve separated them out this time. The Magic Keyboard for iPad Air is $30 less expensive than the Pro versions at each size, so I guess you do save a little money (and lose the backlight, black version, and metal construction of the Pro version), but it’s not a super meaningful amount and I would have loved to have one Magic Keyboard that worked with both lineups like before. It’s not clear to me in the announcement or stories about this update, but it appears that the Air’s Magic Keyboard works with last generation Airs as well, which might imply that the old Magic Keyboard works with this new model as well? It’s unclear and I’ll update this post if I find out.

Why is this boring to some?

My review last year of the iPhone 16 Pro was titled iPhones are in their laptop era where I made the case that the upgrades to that year’s pro iPhones were boring by the old smartphone market standards, but it was pretty expected for a product approaching two decades on the market. My contention was that if you’re expecting iPhones to change as much year to year as they did when they were a brand new product category, then you’re going to be disappointed now and forever more.

I mentioned in that video that a new MacBook Pro was around the corner and that it would likely just be a speed boost over the previous models and that almost no one would call them “boring” updates (this turned out to be true). Why then does a new iPhone or iPad with a simple speed upgrade get lambasted for being boring. My contention then was that people who were paying attention to smartphones in the early days of the industry got used to big changes and they were stuck in those older expectations which weren’t reasonable now in a mature product. Like genuinely, do you want your iPhone to change radically from year to year? What major new hardware change do you even want? A fold-able screen would be a big change, but everything else I can think of is pretty marginal – the rumor mill is pretty excited about an iPhone coming this fall that’s probably quite thin. Yay, but also just a couple years ago we were begging phone makers to make phones thicker to add battery, so to me this feels like novelty chasing more than anything else. That’s fine, humans need novelty, but let’s call it what it is.

But I think there’s something different at play with the iPad and why these updates are likely to be called boring. I think in this case it’s a simple matter of what we want to get better about each product line. My Mac does everything I could imagine, so when you show me a Mac that looks exactly like what I already have but is way faster, then I go “hell yeah, gimme that!” But when you show me a faster iPad, I largely go, “well, speed isn’t what I feel holds me back on the iPad, it’s the software.” My evidence is literally every iPad review in the past 10 years. If you’re perfectly happy with what you can do on an iPad today, then a spec bump is great! However, if you’re not satisfied with what you can do, then it feels boring because in your opinion the wrong bottleneck was addressed.

For my part, I don’t find either of these updates boring, they’re just predictable: better versions of products that people already have and enjoy. They’re not reinventions, they’re not expanding the iPad market, they’re Mac-style updates and while that's not thrilling, it doesn't bother me and makes it so people walking into a store who just need an iPad and don't care about specs are getting something that will last them longer.

Side note, I personally find it hard to be actively annoyed by potentially disappointing updates to products I personally was never going to buy in the first place. Life’s too short. ✌️