No iPad Air Update This Year? Will Apple Hold Back An A9X SoC For The iPad Pro?

Echoing a story the Chinese journal Economic Daily News ran last month, Digitimes’ Sammi Huang and Joseph Tsai reported Friday that they’re hearing from China-based tablet OEM supply chain players that Apple is not planning to release a next-generation iPad Air 2 to replace the current iPad Air 2 that was released in October, 2014.

Photo Courtesy Apple

Instead, Huang and Tsai say the current buzz is that Apple will instead release a fourth-generation iPad mini, which it would be logical to guess will have an A8X system-on-chip and perhaps a slimmer form factor and an 8 megapixel resolution camera, which would restore the engineering and features parity that prevailed between iPad Air and iPad mini prior to last October’s Apple fall event, in which the mini was all but passed over save for addition of Touch ID and a gold color choice. We also may know sooner than usual, with Apple rumored to be planning an iPad announcement along with the customary annual September iPhone upgrade rollout.

As an an iPad Air 2 owner, it’s advantageous to me to stay at the hardware cutting edge for a while longer, especially since the Air 2 is no slouch power-wise. I would also like to see the iPad mini back on par with the iPad Air. With iOS 9’s new split screen features already supporting A8X on the iPad Air 2 (and possibly an A8X mini as well?), there’s no compelling software-based reason for an iPad Air processor speed bump right now. On the other hand, skipping an iPad Air upgrade this year would make the flagship iPad a second-class-citizen in terms of silicon, with the iPhone 6S widely anticipated to be rolled out in a month or so with A9 power.

Here’s another thought. With a larger 12-ish inch iPad Pro/Plus strongly rumored to be in the pipeline, which would be monopolizing tablet development resources, and Apple may have decided to hold off on an A9 tablet announcement until the big ‘un is ready, along with other new features the Pro model is widely expected to have, like a stylus, and Force Touch that it would logically want to introduce on the new premium machine rather than an iPad Air update.

On Saturday, Motley Fool technology specialist Ashraf Eassa reported that a purportedly leaked screen capture of iPhone 6S internals apear to reveal one gigabyte of memory, and an A9 processor running at 2.0 gigahertz clock frequency, which he says would potentially deliver per-core performance with the A9 processor not far off that of full PC-grade processors, which he observes would have interesting implications for the presumed to be forthcoming iPad Pro, with a still hypothetical multi-core A9X chip providing an iPad Pro with enough processing muscle to allow it to serve as a viable notebook replacement for some users.