Apple has a long history of deleting holes. The headphone jack went in 2016, the same year the MacBook Pro traded its HDMI, SD card, and USB-A ports for a row of Thunderbolt 3 ports and a lifetime supply of dongles. US iPhones lost the SIM tray in 2022, and now the speaker grilles on the iPad mini appear to be next on the chopping block. Leaked images in Apple’s own code, spotted by MacRumors, show the iPad mini 8 with a single slim slot at the top of its display glass, much like an iPhone earpiece. That slot lines up with Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman’s reporting on a new vibration-based speaker system, and sealing up the holes buys the mini its first-ever water resistance.
This time, though, removing holes actually gives you something back. Phones have played with the trick before, with Xiaomi’s original Mi MIX using a piezoelectric driver to push sound through its body back in 2016. Apple’s version arrives alongside an A20 Pro chip, a landscape front camera, and a rumored 8.4-inch OLED display. The whole package is expected at Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event in Los Angeles on October 28. Gurman thinks it could cost closer to $799, so let’s see if Apple has the courage to call that a bargain.
Apple Spent Years Fighting Vibration. Now It’s Making Music With It.
The 24-inch iMac packs two pairs of force-cancelling woofers into its 11.5mm body, with each pair moving in opposite directions so their vibrations cancel out before they rattle the chassis. The 16-inch MacBook Pro and Studio Display use the same trick, since Apple spent years treating vibration as a problem to engineer away. The iPad mini 8 reportedly flips that thinking, using vibration as the sound source itself. Apple hasn’t revealed how its system works, so the exact driver and where it lives inside the chassis remain unknown. The leaked images show one slim groove in the glass where the stereo grilles used to be, with the power and volume buttons still on the top edge.
To make the Apple Watch Series 2 swim-proof to 50 meters (164 feet) in 2016, Apple sealed every opening except the speaker, which needs air to make sound. Its fix was to make that speaker vibrate any water back out after a swim, a feature anyone who has heard Water Lock’s little burst of beeps already knows. The iPad mini 8 looks like the next chapter of that story, shrinking the speaker opening to a single slit. Gurman reports water resistance for the first time on an iPad mini, though no IP rating (the standard dust and water score) has leaked yet. Even modest splash protection would cover the kitchen counter, the poolside lounger, and that nightly bath read.
An iPhone 18 Pro Brain, an OLED Face, and a $799 Question Mark
Apple’s code also lists the A20 Pro from the iPhone 18 Pro, built on TSMC’s 2nm process. That leapfrogs two generations past today’s A17 Pro, and MacRumors expects RAM to climb from 8GB to 12GB. More memory means bigger on-device AI models and fewer apps reloading as you bounce between notes, a PDF, and Procreate. The front camera moves to the landscape edge, so video calls stop featuring your left ear. A new Smart Folio (model A3632) in Apple’s French product filings packs two-thirds more magnet material than the 6th-gen mini’s folio, a hint the body has changed enough to need its own cover.
An 8.4-inch OLED panel, up from today’s 8.3-inch LCD, would give late-night reading true blacks and far richer contrast. The refresh rate (how often the screen redraws each second) is still a coin toss, with Gurman reporting Apple tested both 60Hz and 120Hz versions. A Korean supply-chain tipster insists the production panels are locked at 60Hz, which would leave this tablet scrolling less smoothly than a base iPhone 17. The current mini already jumped from $499 to $599 in June on rising memory costs, and Gurman’s guess for the new one lands closer to $799. Apple can seal nearly every hole in this tablet, but the one it might leave in your wallet looks wide open.
