What it tells us about the unreleased M4 MacBook Pro

Apple introduced the iPad mini 7 out of the blue on Tuesday. We knew an update was coming for Apple’s smallest iPad, but we assumed Apple would have an opportunity to announce the 2024 iPad mini and the new M4 Macs, which are also scheduled to launch in late October or early October following month.

The iPad mini 7 is now available for pre-order and can be delivered to consumers next week. The good news isn’t just that you get a much more powerful iPad mini model that can handle Apple Intelligence once the software is installed. A look at the iPad mini 7 shows that the M4 MacBook Pro leaks we’ve seen in recent weeks are actual devices.

I had little reason to doubt the authenticity of the M4 MacBook Execs, which had already been sold on the black market in Russia. There was some degree of competition when it came to the M4 MacBook Pro’s wallpaper selection, but it wasn’t important enough given all the other evidence. The iPad mini 7 tells us that Apple is about to take the plunge and reuse wallpapers for new products.

The official name of the iPad mini 7 is iPad mini (A17 Pro), as shown in the comparison below. This is the pill’s biggest improvement. It has acquired the iPhone 15 Pro’s chip, which is said to run Apple Intelligence features. This also means the tablet has 8GB of RAM, another nice upgrade.

Add in the 128GB base storage and the same $499 starting price, and the iPad mini 7 is a sort of small iPad Pro. It’s actually a small iPad Air, if you will.

If you test Apple’s latest mini-tablets on Apple’s website, you’ll notice that the two devices are otherwise similar. This includes the default wallpaper that Apple chose for the promotional photos.

The iPad mini 7 features the same wallpaper as its predecessor. This seems like an odd decision, but Apple has overall given the Mini a small improvement. We definitely expect a significant increase in efficiency. But basically that’s all we get.

Apple apparently thinks this isn’t enough to qualify for a change of scenery. Given what we’ve seen in these hands-on videos, Apple will do the same with the M4 MacBook Pro.

The wallpaper on the M4 MacBook Pro’s screen and show was the only factor that made people question the authenticity of the leaks. Why would Apple use the same promotional image for a next-generation device that is speculated to deliver a significant increase in performance? Then again: Why shouldn’t it be like that?

When I looked at these leaks, I found that they were very convincing. The M4 MacBook Pro seemed real, and the benchmarks run on the device confirmed this idea. When the second unboxing video from Russia surfaced, the background image seemed inconsequential.

Now that the iPad mini 7 is here, it’s clear that Apple will reuse promotional photos for some of its products whenever it pleases.

Just like the iPad mini 7, the lower M4 MacBook Professional will look almost exactly like its predecessor, save for an additional USB-C port. It is similar to the MacBook Execs M3 Professional and M3 Max, which each have 3 Thunderbolt ports. In addition, the specifications are the biggest upgrade of the MacBook Pro 2024. The lower model gets the lower M4 chip with 16GB of RAM.

Finally, the launch of the iPad mini 7 suggests that we won’t be hosting an Apple media event later this month. Instead, the M4 Macs, like the iPad mini 7, could be announced through press releases.