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AppleUnboxed, and I’ll be publishing all my posts here at Forbes, and there’ll be even more of them, from today.
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Apple is famously tight-lipped about its products until they are announced. But new data shows that a new iPhone and a new iPad are coming. Apple has given information that’s as opaque as possible but still has inadvertently confirmed that these products are a phone and a tablet which have not been seen before.
The Eurasian Economic Commission is the last place you might expect to see an Apple leak, but in fact its database is a reliable source of Apple product detail.
In order for products to be sold in the countries the Commission covers (Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), every product must be registered in advance.
New details have just appeared, almost exactly three years to the day since the Commission revealed codes which turned out to be the iPad and iPad mini which were launched in March 2019.
So, the new details, spotted by French site Consomac, likely point to products which will land in just a matter of weeks, if previous timetables are matched.
Well, we’ve been expecting a new iPhone SE this Spring, and it looks like it may mean there’s just a couple of months to wait.
The database lists model numbers—nothing as helpful as saying iPhone SE, of course—instead simply describing the models as A2595, A2783, and A2784 alongside codes which refer to existing models. These will likely indicate different versions, perhaps according to storage levels or to different models according to different markets. The current iPhone SE is available in two storage capacities, 64GB and 128GB. I’d expect that this will continue, rather than the third code indicating an extra storage model. But you never know.
So, how do we know these codes refer to a new iPhone?
Easy: because the listing connects the devices to a particular operating system, iOS 15.
The database also refers to new iPad models—again, we know this because iPadOS is mentioned—and these may be the expected iPad Air. There are eight reference numbers here, again perhaps referring to the needs of different markets, different storage capacities but also, this be a tablet, whether the tablet is wi-fi only or has cellular capabilities as well.
There are currently two storage capacities for iPad Air, 64GB and 256GB, each in wi-fi and wi-fi and cellular versions, so that’s four of the codes spoken for, theoretically. But it’s not cut-and-dried. Sometimes codes appear and are not used, sometimes one code can be used across several versions – the current A2316 code refers to the iPad Air 4th generation, and isn’t related to the storage capacity, while there are three codes for the same tablet in its wi-fi and cellular model.
The general consensus is that this Spring’s tablet release is likely to be a new iPad Air. After all, the iPad and iPad mini were updated just a couple of months back, so it’s not likely they’ll see any changes just yet. And though a new iPad Pro is possible, a Fall release for the top-flight tablet is more probable.
