If you’re shopping for an 11 inch iPad Pro you may have been keenly looking at the generation for each model to ensure you’re prepared to order the right one. Or, as some folks have reported, you went ahead and ordered one and are now confused that it’s showing a generation number that seems outdated.
The M2 iPad Pro 12.9″ is a 6th gen, for instance, yet you see above that the 11″ model with the same M2 chip is shown as a 4th gen. What gives?
Rest assured, you weren’t sent an old iPad from two generations ago by mistake.
It’s a little confusing at a glance, but Apple have decided to list each model’s generation by how many iterations of that exact size have come out — not by how many iPad Pro iterations there have been.
There have been 6 generations of the iPad Pro thus far (at time of publishing), and the reason the 12.9″ version displays as 6th gen is because from the very first iPad Pro there has always been a 12.9″ version.
But it took two generations for the smaller sized option to reach 11″. (Previously there was a 9.5″ and 10.5″.)
In Apple’s way of seeing it then, there have only been 4 generations of the 11″, even if the latest 11″ iPad Pro is essentially in-line with the latest 12.9″ in terms of hardware. Except for the screen of course.
For the customer it would probably be simpler to refer to each major release’s offering as X generation, regardless of screen size. This way you would know, for instance, that a 6th gen iPad Pro was this year’s model regardless of size.
The alternate way to accomplish that as it stands is to go by the processor chip inside the iPad. If you ensure that you’re looking at M2 iPad Pros, for instance, you know as of right now that it’s the latest gen regardless of screen size. In the same way that M1 chipped iPads are now the previous generation.