We believed that Apple had killed all hardware falling into the "Air" variant of MacBooks and even iPads. However, we were really surprised to hear that Apple could release a successor to Apple iPad Pro 2.
Why? Because we were firmly convinced that Apple decided that anything with the suffix "Pro" would really induce more sales not just for the name change but also a performance boost. Thanks to better hardware that we now see in iPad Pro 9.7 or even the giant 12.7 for that case. But, yes we're going to see a new iPad Air 3 if not this year, it's definitely in the line.
In terms of design, we cannot really expect a change in the outlook of the hardware. Probably it might come thinner and maybe even less heavy. It's mostly certain that the build quality of the new iPad might be even better. We might see the Jet black colour that Apple introduced to their iPhones.
A previously leaked information about iPad Air 3 pointed that Apple will implement the 2016 A9X chipsets that were seen in iPad Pro along with the same quad-speaker audio system.
If the specifications are to be anything similar to the iPad Pro variants, then we might definitely see a 3GB or 4GB memory - which will really dominate the benchmarks just like iPad Pro.
We can also assume if Apple ditches the 32GB storage and instead up the base limit to 64GB, then they will have the successive variants of 128GB and 256GB for literally no price increase at all. The sales would definitely be a success. But however we guess, Apple will rather stick to 32GB.
In terms of OS, we'd definitely see iOs 10 that Apple recently released few days ago. The new Touch ID would definitely be a good add-on. There's also a possibility of Apple using true-tone display to all the variants and not just limit to a single choice out there like what happened to the iPad Pro 9.7.
In terms of pricing, there would definitely be an increase if Apple continues the trend of overpricing their hardware to a limit where people have to question the decisions they undertake.
Ipadair3updates reports that they speculate it to be somewhere around the price range of 600$ for the base variant. However, they've mentioned the storage size being 16GB, which we believe won't even exist at the time of release partly due to a very low storage space available after software and application installations along with their updates.
