What it tells us about unreleased M4 MacBook Pro

Apple on Tuesday unveiled the iPad mini 7 out of the blue. We knew an update to Apple’s smallest iPad was coming, but the expectation was that Apple would hold some sort of event to announce the 2024 iPad mini and the new M4 Macs, which are also supposed to come out by the end of October or early next month.

Meanwhile, the iPad mini 7 is available for preorder and will ship to buyers by next week. The good news isn’t just that you get a much more powerful iPad mini version capable of handling Apple Intelligence once the software is ready. A look at the iPad mini 7 will tell you that the M4 MacBook Pro leaks we saw in the previous weeks showed genuine devices.

I had little reason to doubt the authenticity of the M4 MacBook Pros already selling on the black market in Russia. There was a point of contention, the M4 MacBook Pro’s wallpaper choice, but it wasn’t significant enough in light of all the other evidence. The iPad mini 7 practically tells us that Apple will do the unexpected and reuse wallpapers for brand-new products.

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

Add the 128GB base storage and the same $499 starting price, and the iPad mini 7 is almost a small iPad Pro. It’s certainly a small iPad Air, if you will.

Comparing Apple’s latest mini tablets on Apple’s site will tell you the two devices are otherwise identical. That includes the default wallpaper Apple chose for the marketing images.

The iPad mini 7 features the same wallpaper as its predecessor. That seems an odd choice, but then again, Apple gave the mini a small upgrade in the grand scheme of things. We’re looking at a substantial boost in performance, yes. But, essentially, that’s all we’re getting.

Apple apparently thinks that’s not enough to qualify for a wallpaper change. Given what we saw in those hands-on videos, Apple will do the same with the M4 MacBook Pro.

The wallpaper on the M4 MacBook Pro box and display was the only thing that made people question the authenticity of the leaks. Why would Apple reuse the same marketing image for a next-gen device that is supposed to get a major performance bump? Then again, why wouldn’t it?

When looking at those leaks, I said they were very convincing. The M4 MacBook Pro seemed to be real, and the benchmarks performed on the device supported that idea. When the second unboxing video from Russia emerged, the wallpaper 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 feels like it.

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

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