Sources: Apple is working on a redesigned high-end iPad with Face ID, slimmer bezels, no home button, coming as early as 2018; source says new Pencil coming too
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Context & Ripple Effects
This November 2017 Bloomberg report was the first detailed look at what became the biggest iPad Pro redesign to date: dropping the home button and Touch ID in favor of Face ID, slimming the bezels, and pairing the hardware with a new Pencil that would pair by proximity. The follow-up reporting a year later confirmed the shape of it — thin bezels with no notch, Face ID working in both portrait and landscape, and an October 30 event where Apple showed off nearly edge-to-edge screens and a USB-C port.
First-order effects
- The iPad Pro's identity shifts from 'big iPhone' to distinct product line: losing the home button means Face ID becomes the sole biometric, and the USB-C port revealed at the October 30 event breaks the Lightning accessory ecosystem that had defined iPads since 2012.
- Case and accessory makers built around the home button and Lightning connector face an immediate redesign cycle for their highest-margin iPad Pro lines.
Second-order effects
- A USB-C iPad Pro starts competing directly with laptops on connectivity, pressuring Apple's own MacBook line at the low end and giving enterprise buyers a single-cable tablet option they previously lacked.
- The proximity-pairing Pencil pushes stylus rivals like Wacom-backed tablet vendors to match frictionless accessory pairing rather than compete on pressure sensitivity alone.
Third-order effects
- The 2018 redesign established a cadence the corpus keeps confirming: the next major iPad Pro overhaul didn't arrive until the M3/OLED generation targeted for 2024, suggesting Apple treats the Pro iPad as a platform refreshed on roughly five-year design cycles rather than annual ones.
- With each redesign the iPad Pro absorbs more Mac traits — USB-C, edge-to-edge displays, eventually keyboard-focused accessories — pointing toward a long-run convergence where the boundary between iPad and entry MacBook is a software decision, not a hardware one.
The trend: The iPad Pro is being repositioned as a laptop-class device through infrequent but deep hardware redesigns, each one pulling it closer to the Mac lineup it sits beside.