Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12:

The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14 chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have the A17 Pro chip, matching the iPad mini, and a bump to 8 gigabytes of memory. That’s the minimum needed to support the new AI platform.

The new iPads sport the A16 chip and thus do not support Apple Intelligence. But who cares about little details like that when you know the codenames, which is what really matters.

I’ll bet what happened is that Gurman was right, and the new iPads were set to use the A17 Pro chip and support Apple Intelligence. But after Gurman spoiled it seven weeks ago, Apple scrapped those plans and changed the chips to the A16 just to spite him.

Tapbots:

v2.3 is now available on the App Store for Mac and iOS/iPadOS! What’s new?

• Grouped Notifications (Mention and Notification tabs are now merged)
• Support for AlphaNumeric Post IDs (Can now log into more services like GoToSocial)
• Accessibility Improvements
• Bug Fixes

I don’t like grouped notifications, but I’ve got nothing to complain about, because there’s a simple toggle at the top to just show mentions. Perfect.

The big news from Tapbots, though, is the announcement of Phoenix, a dedicated client for Bluesky:

Why two different clients? Why not one that supports both?

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

Hear hear to that.

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