iOS 12 Beta Confirms New Edge-to-Edge iPad Pros are on the Horizon

With Apple’s annual fall product announcements rumored for a little over five-weeks from now, all eyes are focused on the highly-anticipated spate of new gadgets the company is expected to unveil in early-September. 

Among those products will be the company’s trio of new iPhones — all three of which will embody iPhone X-inspired designs, complete with edge-to-edge displays, TrueDepth cameras and no hardware Home buttons. Apple is also widely believed to be readying a redesigned Apple Watch Series 4, several new Mac computers, and even a brand-new family of redesigned iPad Pro tablets boasting a trove of advanced technologies and upgrades.

Apple’s 2018 iPad Pro

Back in January, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman was first to ignite rumors of a looming iPad Pro refresh, citing sources in a report who indicated that Cupertino is working on an all-new iPad Pro form-factor for 2018.

The redesign was said in the report to not only shrink the current iPad Pro’s footprint, reducing the thickness of its bezels, but also possibly increase the size of its display.

In the months since, Apple’s rumored iPad Pro refresh has become less of a rumor and more of an impending reality, as leak after leak has revealed just about everything we need to know about the upcoming iPads save for their price and release date.

We’ve heard, for instance, that the new tablets will be smaller (and yet magnificently more powerful) than their predecessors, lacking hardware home buttons but replacing biometric security with a bezel-embedded TrueDepth camera.

We’ve also heard the models could potentially boast even larger displays at 11- and possibly 12.9-inches or larger — but this much remains to be seen, of course.

Confirmed Beyond the Shadow of Doubt

As if we needed any further confirmation that new iPad Pros are coming, Thursday brought us even more concrete evidence in the form of code discovered in the latest iOS 12 developer beta release.

The finding embodies an icon asset which was discovered hidden in iOS 12 beta’s battery usage user interface, and takes the form of the revealing icons below. These icons depict a distinctively venerable iPad model — alongside the new icon, which flaunts a redesigned iPad with no hardware home button and significantly reduced bezels.

Other code in the latest developer beta confirms that the upcoming iPad Pro models will feature TrueDepth cameras and Face ID technology. It’s worth noting that the iPhone X’s distinctive ‘notch’ (the protruding Face ID capital of the world) will be completely hidden by the tablet’s proportionately thicker bezels.

Face ID in lieu of a hardware Home button on 2018’s iPad Pro was a prospect first spearheaded by the former KGI Securities analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, shortly after Gurman’s initial report surfaced.

Will you be picking up one of Apple’s new iPad Pro models this fall? Let us know in the comments!