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 expected Apple to hold some sort of event to announce the 2024 iPad mini and the new M4 Macs, which are also launching in late October or early next year should month.

The iPad mini 7 is now available for pre-order and will be delivered to buyers next week. The good news isn’t just that you’ll get a much more powerful iPad mini version that can handle Apple Intelligence once the software is ready. One look at the iPad mini 7 will tell you that the M4 MacBook Pro leaks we’ve seen over the past few weeks showed off real devices.

I had little reason to doubt the authenticity of the M4 MacBook Pros already being sold on the black market in Russia. There was one point of contention, namely the choice of wallpaper on the M4 MacBook Pro, but it was not significant enough given all the other evidence. The iPad mini 7 practically shows us that Apple is going to do the unexpected and reuse wallpapers on brand new products.

The official name of iPad mini 7 is iPad mini (A17 Pro), as shown in the comparison below. This is the tablet’s biggest upgrade. It has the chip from the iPhone 15 Pro, which it needs to run Apple Intelligence functions. This also means the tablet has 8GB of RAM, another great upgrade.

Add in the 128GB base storage and the same $499 starting price, and the iPad mini 7 is almost a small iPad Pro. If you will, it is definitely a small iPad Air.

If you compare Apple’s latest mini-tablets on Apple’s website, you’ll notice that the two devices are otherwise identical. This also includes the default wallpaper that Apple chose for the marketing images.

The iPad mini 7 features the same wallpaper as its predecessor. That seems like an odd choice, but then again Apple has given the Mini a bit of an upgrade overall. We expect a significant increase in performance, yes. 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 box and display was the only thing that made people doubt the authenticity of the leaks. Why would Apple use the same marketing image for a next-generation device that is supposed to see a significant increase in performance? On the other hand: why not?

When I looked at these leaks, I said 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 marketing images for some of its products whenever it pleases.

Like the iPad mini 7, the base MacBook Pro M4 will look almost identical to its predecessor, save for an additional USB-C port. It is identical to the MacBook Pros M3 Pro and M3 Max, which each have 3 Thunderbolt ports. Additionally, the biggest upgrade to the 2024 MacBook Pro is in the specs. The base model has the base M4 chip with 16GB of RAM.

Finally, the launch of the iPad mini 7 suggests that we may not have an Apple media event later this month. Instead, the M4 Macs could be announced via press releases like the iPad mini 7.