Gargantuan 14.1-inch iPad leaks and you won't believe what chip it'll have

Have you ever looked at the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and thought that it looked just a little bit too small? Not many people have, but for those that do want something bigger there could be something on the horizon. That thing could be a 14.1-inch iPad.

We say iPad and not iPad Pro because that's the way leakers have been describing it so far, but in reality it seems highly likely to sit at the top of Apple's lineup. Whether it'll be called something like iPad Ultra or not remains to be seen, but it does seem to be coming whatever it winds up being called. Now, a new leak has suggested that it'll also come with a special chip to go along with that special screen size.

According to Twitter leaker Revegnus, the 14.1-inch iPad will come with an Apple-designed M3 Pro. That perhaps tells us when we should expect this thing to ship - some point in 2024, most likely - but it also suggests that this will be quite the beast of a machine.

To put that into perspective, no iPad has shipped with a Pro-grade M-series chip before. In fact, the M2 iPad Pro is already incredibly fast and the thought of even a base M3 chip seems overkill. But an M3 Pro? Now that could be something special.

Why does the iPad need so much power? The leaker might have the answer. According to their tweet, the 14.1-inch iPad will get some features that are currently reserved for the Mac with Apple porting them over to iPadOS for the first time.

The leaker went on to say in a further tweet that this iPadOS update won't arrive until next year, perhaps again adding more weight to the assumption that the 14.1-inch iPad won't ship until some point in 2024.

The suggestion that Apple is working on a massive iPad isn't new, but this is the first time that we've seen proper mention of what chip it will be powered by. The arrival of an M3 Pro would make this the fastest iPad ever and would surely make for quite the performance monster for people who want to get video and audio work done on it. How hot will that chip get? We'll have to wait and see, but we can be confident that the iPad won't have a fan inside to keep it cool. Thankfully a 14.1-inch screen means a similarly sized slab of metal on the back to help keep that chip cool while it works.