Yesterday, Apple unveiled a new, lower cost Pencil. And if you open the Chinese press release for this announcement and scroll all the way to the bottom you will see that the company also introduced a new revision of the Apple iPad (2022). It’s only for China and the upgrade is really only new in that market. We can see why Cupertino didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
What’s new is that the 5G versions of the tablet now support eSIM. Previously, you had to put in a nano-SIM card (and that is still an option), now you can skip the physical card if you want. Note that this is available only to China Unicom subscribers.
Of course, Apple was already selling iPad (2022) tablets with eSIM in North America, Europe, India and other markets, which is why this announcement is only for China. The local market just doesn’t have many eSIM options and even the iPhones (which are eSIM-only in the US) still use physical SIM cards.
The 5G version of the iPad (2022) is available from Apple.com at CNY 4,800 for a 64GB slate, up from CNY 3,600 for the Wi-Fi only version. The 256GB 5G model is CNY 6,000.
