Apple iPad Pro leaps two generations forward as iPad Air melds power and choice
“Biggest day for the iPad, since its introduction”, is how Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, summarised the day’s proceedings. It had been a fairly long wait. The iPad Pro and iPad Air lines last were updated a couple of years ago, at different points. Apple is more than making up for the time that’s passed since, with significant updates across the entire iPad portfolio. So much so, the new iPad Pro range marks the first instance of an iPad ushering in the next generation of Apple Silicon, the M4. Apple Pencil gets the “Pro” moniker too with associated smartness. The iPad Air gets two screen sizes as another MacBook or laptop replacement. A new Magic Keyboard. And the entry-spec iPad gets a price tweak.
It was expected that Apple would upgrade the iPad Pro display to an OLED, or organic light emitting diode. And it has happened, with what Apple calls a “state-of-the-art tandem OLED technology”. They say the size of an iPad Pro’s display (particularly the larger 13-inch) was too big for an OLED panel to light itself the way it is expected to. Hence, tandem – the use of two OLED panels to make up one screen that you’d see. They say this will handle sub-millisecond control over the colour and luminance of each pixel, and the first introduction of nano-texture coating as an option on an iPad (only the 1TB and 2TB options, for now), should help with precision driven creator workflows.
This is, at 5.3mm thickness for the 11-inch and 5.1-inch thickness for the 13-inch, the thinnest Apple products ever. Even thinner than the last known iPod Nano, which was around the same measurement.
The second big update for the iPad Pro is the introduction of the M4. Not an iMac. Not a MacBook. But an iPad gets the privilege to bring forth the fourth chapter of Apple’s own silicon journey. This has up to four performance cores and six efficiency cores, alongside machine learning accelerators (more on Apple’s AI pitch, in a bit) with the net comparative result pegging this machine with up to 1.5x faster performance than the previous iPad Pro line-up with the M2 chip. Since this is an evolution of the M3 that we’ve experienced in detail on the Macs, a 10-core GPU alongside Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, are being made available on the iPad, for the first time.
The new iPad Pros’, with all the power and display generational leaps as well as design improvements (a new charging mechanism for the Apple Pencil, and the FaceTime camera repositioning), do cost a pretty penny. The 11-inch iPad Pro is priced ₹99,900 onwards, while the 13-inch iPad Pro is priced ₹1,29,900 onwards. Base storage is 256GB, and choices are 512GB, 1TB and 2TB. The option for nano-texture glass coating for reduced reflectivity adds ₹10,000 to the price tags.
Good time then, to detail the M4 chip, which we’ll also see in Macs at some point or the other, through the year. Some other highlights, building on the 10-core CPU and a new 10-core GPU, include the most powerful Neural Engine ever in an Apple device, with 38 trillion operations per second – for perspective, that’s 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic chip. Apple minces no words, “With this advanced level of performance, the Neural Engine in M4 is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today.” This, when Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and the Windows PC ecosystem was beginning to build a case for AI PCs, with the latest generation chips.
It is expected that Apple will detail its artificial intelligence (AI) integration plans for iOS, iPadOS and macOS at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next month. This is the groundwork being placed, very nicely. Some existing AI use-cases include Live Captions for real-time audio captions, and Visual Look Up, which identifies objects in video and photos, both available on iPadOS.
The iPad Air refresh widens screen size choice, and therefore a potential for different use-cases. The 11-inch option is now joined by a 13-inch iPad Air as well, which when paired with the new Magic Keyboard, can potentially become a MacBook (more on that; the keyboard redesign is important) or laptop alternative for some workflows (whether iPadOS is at parity with macOS, is a subjective decision). There is spec parity irrespective of which display size you choose, with the M2 chip now its beating heart. We’ve already seen that perform in the Mac line-up, and that’s simply making the iPad Air’s versatility pitch even stronger. Apple, to be specific, says this is as much as 50% faster than the previous generation iPad Air, with M1. That itself was no slouch.
Apple confirms that the 11-inch iPad Air is priced ₹59,900 onwards, while the 13-inch iPad Air will be ₹79,900 onwards. Storage choices are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB, alongside Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi and Cellular connectivity options.
The Apple Pencil Pro joins the Apple Pencil (2nd generation) and the Apple Pencil (USB-C) as the third choice for potential buyers. This is the most feature loaded, as the Pro naming would suggest. New additions include a barrel roll feature, in which you rotate the barrel of the Pencil to change the orientation of the brush tools. The squeeze feature works with sensors towards the front of the pencil and detect your fingers to open on-screen menus for colour choices, tools and line weights. Haptic feedback as well as plugging into Apple’s Find My network too. This is priced at ₹11,900 and that’s the same pricing as the second-generation Pencil, with all other functionality at parity.
If there is an intent to use an iPad with a keyboard, Apple has updated the Magic Keyboard as well. Not only has it been slimmed down to match the iPad Pro’s newly slimmed down profile, but Apple says keys have been reworked and the touchpad is now aluminium, to bring some parity with the keyboard you may be familiar on a MacBook. Added to the price of a new iPad Pro, this does hold a heavy price tag – ₹29,900 for the 11-inch and ₹33,900 for the 13-inch.
