iPadOS 27 was officially announced this week, alongside the other 2027 releases for Apple’s other platforms.

For iPad users, this year’s release adds a bit of a solemn note as it officially drops support for the legendary 2018 iPad Pro, as well as the 5th generation iPad Mini, the 8th generation iPad, and the 3rd generation iPad Air.

A Requiem for a Great iPad

A slightly overused Tim Cook-ism of past keynotes is “this is the biggest change to [product name] since [previous product redesign].” But the 2018 iPad Pro is a case where this was actually true.

Modern iPad Design

This redesign introduced the modern iPad design language that continues to inform the look of every tablet Apple ships today.

• Even bezels
• Rounded corners on the display
• Flat sides

It also removed the familiar home button, embracing the gesture based navigation system that was introduced with the iPhone X the previous year.

All these changes put together were great if you were in the “iPad as a laptop” camp because connected to a keyboard, the iPad actually looked like a laptop instead of a big iPhone/iPod Touch in a keyboard case.

This design also moved the Smart Connector from the side of the iPad to the back of the device to support the new Smart Keyboard Folio (Anyone remember when people thought this change meant the Smart Keyboard would only work in portrait mode 😂).

Rethought Connectivity

From a connectivity perspective, this iPad Pro was the first to ditch Apple’s Lightning connector in favor of a modern USB port. This opened up the iPad Pro to a much larger ecosystem of USB accessories, and enabled new use cases, like charging your iPhone over USB. Strangely, it took another year and the introduction of iPadOS before you could plug in and use a USB external storage device.

This iPad Pro was the first to include a magnetic inductive charging system for the new second generation Apple Pencil, providing a charging option that didn’t require plugging the Apple Pencil awkwardly into the iPad.

And, last, but certainly not least, this iPad redesign incorporated Face ID, bringing secure facial recognition to Apple’s highest end tablet. As of 2026, the Mac still hasn’t figured out this trick.

A Precursor to Apple Silicon on the Mac

I’d argue the biggest innovation that came with the 2018 Pro was its A12X Bionic chip. The iPad Pro had been using Apple’s X chips (A9X, A10X) for a few generations to provide it more advanced graphics power, but this was the first one of those chips that felt like it was truly laptop class.

And it turned out it really was. Apple even used the A12Z, an A12X variant with an additional GPU core, to power its Developer Transition Kit for the Apple Silicon transition on Mac. Which means, this chip was powerful enough to run the much heavier macOS.

The A12X featured an eight core design with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, and a new timing controller that meant for the first time, all eight cores could be active at once.

Apple’s Neural Engine came to the iPad for the first time as well, powering features like Face ID and other Machine Learning based tasks.

The storage controller on the A12X was improved so that the iPad Pro could finally support up to 1TB of onboard storage.

Add all these things together, and you can see why Apple had the confidence that their tablet chips were performant enough to be used for next-generation Macs.

Conclusion

I’m being a little dramatic by calling this a “requiem”. Obviously, this device would stop working just because it no longer gets software updates. There’s even a good chance this iPad will continue to see security updates for a couple more years, extending its useful lifespan.

After getting eight years of OS support, I think it’s worth briefly reflecting on this landmark iPad. Like the iPhone X did for the iPhone, the 2018 iPad Pro redefined the iPad, and really turned the iPad Pro into Apple’s most modern and forward-looking computer.