Should You Pick Up An iPad Air Now Or Wait For The Rumored iPad Pro?

If you’re in the market for a new tablet, you might be tempted to pick up an iPad Air, but odds are that you’ll want to wait for a bit. Apple might be on the verge of releasing an entirely new model of iPad, one that would blow the current iPad Air out of the water.

The iPad Air is almost a year old by now, and it’s still a pretty powerful machine. If you’re looking a tablet-sized device to play games, watch movies, and surf the web, it’s hard to top the iPad Air in terms of functionality and design. There’s a reason the iPad line is consistently at the top for sales of a single tablet unit: it’s hands down the best option around.

The next version of the iPad Air, as The Inquisitr has already reported, might not see too much in the way of a big update when Apple unveils it some time next month. Apple is unlikely to change the iPad Air’s design for the second generation, and it will likely see only the addition of an A8 processor and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor Apple currently uses on its iPhones.

That means the next generation of iPad Air will be as useful for productivity purposes as previous iPad models. That is, you’ll be able to be productive on it, but only so much. You’ll have to deal with the iPad Air’s relatively small screen, of course, and you’ll need to buy a keyboard add-on if you want to use your iPad for content creation.

At least one of those detractors, though, might fixed in the near future. Rumor has it that Apple is on the verge of making a big push for the enterprise and productivity segment with an as-yet-unannounced iPad: the iPad Pro. That device will likely have the same general design aesthetic as the iPad Air, but it’s rumored to have a 12.9-inch display.

That would give it a much larger display area than the current iPad Air, comparable even to notebooks that productivity-minded people carry around. That iPad would, of course, be much more suitable for generating reports and so forth.

As Apple Insider notes, the so-called iPad Pro could also feature a better processor to go along with that bigger screen. The iPad Pro, should it materialize, could feature an A8X processor, essentially a much faster version of the chip seen in the iPhone 6.

It could also feature more RAM than we’ve seen in previous versions of the iPad. Rumor has it that Apple will bump up the RAM on the iPad Pro and iPad Air to a full 2GB. That would put it in line with a number of its other tablet competitors, although Apple’s iOS tends to run fine even without the high RAM capacity of other tablets.

So, should you pick up an iPad Air now or just wait a few weeks until the iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro are released? Well, considering that the iPad Pro is just an Apple rumor at the moment, you might not want to bank too hard on it actually existing. If you absolutely need an iPad for productivity purposes, go ahead and pick one up.

If you’re the hopeful type, though, and you’re holding out hope for a bigger display and a more powerful processor, you might want to wait for the iPad Pro. Either way, waiting could be a good thing, since it’s likely that the current models of the iPad Air will see a price drop when the successor is released in the coming weeks.

[Lead image via iDownloadBlog]