Apple May Launch Five New iPads This Year

It’s that time of year again. We’re just months away from Apple’s annual hardware extravaganza where the company typically releases a slew of new products. And it now looks like several of those products will be new iPads.

Tech site MySmartPrice found Eurasian Economic Commission (ECC) documents that could very well be for five upcoming iPads. Apple reportedly filed two certifications with Russia’s EEC certification agency that list the model numbers A2068, A2198, A2230, A2197, and A2228. While the papers don’t offer many details about these unnamed devices, they do say that the models will ship with iPadOS 13, which all but confirms that these are, in fact, new iPads.

The question now is what models are we looking at? Rumors have been circulating for months that Apple will release a slightly larger 10.2-inch iPad as a possible replacement for the current 9.7-inch iPad, which launched over a year ago.

As for what the other model numbers could belong to, South Korea’s UND (via MySmartPrice) believes a 10.5-inch iPad with a brand new design is in the works. Rumors about a massive foldable iPad with 5G are also floating around, but that device isn’t supposed to arrive until next year.

If we had to place our chips somewhere it would be on a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Apple’s high-end tablet got a significant overhaul last year, but will soon be a year old, which makes it a prime candidate for a refresh.

Apple already overhauled the iPad Air and iPad mini earlier this year, giving them a more powerful A12 Bionic chip, among other nice upgrades. It seems unlikely that Apple would revisit these two devices so soon after launching new models, but we can’t be 100% sure until Tim Cook takes the stage. That typically happens in early September, which means we’re just a few months away from figuring out the identity of this mysterious tablets.―Laptop Mag