Apple’s Next iPad Rumoured to Ditch Home Button

Despite persistent rumours of Apple planning to abandon the home button on iPhones, it might actually be the iPad to be the first to get this feature omitted. The move is to allow for a larger 10.9 inch screen compared to the current iPad’s 9.7 inch while having the same footprint. The rumour comes from a report by Japanese blog Makotakara who has leaked some Taiwanese chain supply information before with reliable accuracy, informing ahead of everyone else that a 10.1 inch iPad was on the way back in October. According to their sources in Taiwan, the new thin-bezel iPad will have a thicker 7.5mm body despite the wider screen, thickness equal to the original Apple iPad Air. A larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro is also expected to come with a 7.2mm thickness (up by 3mm).

The larger screen has been said to fit the demands of educators and enterprise markets who can use the extra screen real estate. The new iPad screen will not be OLED when it launches in the first half of 2017, however OLED models are expected to hit the market in 2018 according to an August report by KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The new 2017 iPad update will also bring the A10X CPU, a faster performance chip than the one used on the iPhone 7.