If you're buying an Apple tablet, the iPad Pro 12.9 is the largest slate you can pick up, with a screen that's 12.9 inches across diagonally (as the name suggests). But it sounds like we could see bigger slates from the company in the coming years.
This comes from a column by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who says "I’m told that Apple has engineers and designers exploring larger iPads that could hit stores a couple of years down the road". That's all the information that's provided, so this news is pretty vague at the moment.
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Gurman has a great track record regarding upcoming Apple news, correctly reporting on the iPad Pro 2021's M1 chipset and screen changes for example. So it seems they are tuned in with the processes of Apple's engineers, lending credence to this rumor.
For now, though, there's no solid information about these upcoming super-sized iPad Pros. We don't know when they'll come along, how big they'll actually be, and if the 11-inch and 12.9-inch versions will both still be sold.
Why use a big-screen iPad Pro?
For some people, a giant iPad Pro might be a curious concept - the current models are just fine for lots of tasks, like watching movies, word processing or responding to email.
But for some tasks, screen space is vital, and even the iPad Pro 12.9 can feel too teensy for these. For example, video editing needs lots of space for the timeline, the file drive, the video window, and lots of settings and options, and on a sub-13-inch display these can look cramped and hard to press accurately.
So perhaps we could see iPads with screens that rival laptops or even smaller monitors, and likely bigger batteries to match. This kind of slate would be useful for a different audience of professionals, and might convince them to stop using laptops for jobs a tablet could handle.
