The Next-generation iPad Pro and iPad Air Announced at the B2B Virtual Event in Las Vegas, June 14 – 24th
The iPad Pro isn’t an iPad for casual use, at either the new iPad Air or even the cheaper 10th- generation iPad. But Apple likes to do its best hardware work on its highest-end devices, and this Pro looks like it holds up the tradition nicely.
The processing power won’t be lost by sticking with the storage tiers of 512 and 256gigabytes. Both versions of the chip use the same memory bandwidth (120 gigabytes/s) and both also support hardware-accelrated ray tracing. You wouldn’t notice a difference in use with six efficiency cores, which are designed to deal with less demanding tasks.
Apple’s iPads have been on the back burner since 2022—there have been plenty of iPhones and Macs since, even a mixed reality headset, but it’s been two years since we’ve seen a new tablet. The wait is over. During its virtual event today, Apple announced the next-generation iPad Pro and iPad Air, an all-new M4 chip, as well as updated accessories.
The new Pro has a new screen that is larger than the previous one. It is difficult to make a good guess of how it looks, but it is clear that the display is much sharper than you think. The “Tandem OLED” appears to be a bright device and the viewing angles are ideal for an iPad. The screen looked good but it didn’t wow me, like the redesign did.
The larger model feels very comfortable to hold and use because of the huge difference. That is up to 13 inches from 12.9 before, it is even larger now. It is easy to tell the difference between the Pro and the new Air from across the room, especially if you have carried around an 11-inch Pro for a year and a half. The biggest question I have for now is about fragility: is the new Pro potentially too thin? It feels rigid and sturdy, but there are always tradeoffs for a device like this. We have lots of testing to do.
There is a row of function keys at the top of the machine which will make it a more useful keyboard and track pad machine in general. iPadOS is not a good operating system for the trackpad, but Apple will likely improve that when they make the next version of their OS.
The Pencil Pro… well, it feels like the Pencil. You definitely feel the haptic feedback when you squeeze or double-tap, which is a nice addition to the setup, and it was smooth and fast on the Pro’s screen as I drew and moved stuff around. (I am decidedly not an artist, so we’re going to need someone to more thoroughly test this.) Software and third-party developers are the most important contributors to the Pencil Pro’s best features.
Strategy for the New M4: Why it could be a Different OS in the Next Mac OS Generation? Apple’s Outlook on the Worldwide Developers Conference 2019
Since 2020, Apple has exclusively launched its M-series processors alongside another Mac. That’s no longer the case as Apple unveiled the all-new M4 chipset debuting inside the new iPad Pro.
The shift in strategy makes sense, seeing as how Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (which focuses on new software capabilities coming to its entire product line) is next month. According to a recent report, Apple is in talks with Openai to include some of the company’s features into the next version of the phone’s operating system and that a new slate of generativeai features is included in the next iteration of the operating system.