Everything that Apple has to say at its event today
The Big Difference Between the Pro and the New Air: Is it Too Thin for a Representation of a Luminous Display?
The new Pro, besides its waif dimensions, includes the new screen, which is anOLED. It’s a little tough to make too much of exactly how it looks based on a quick glance in a crowded room, but even from a distance, it’s clear how much crisper the display really is. Apple’s latest device, the ‘Tandem OLED,’ appears to be plenty bright and excellent in the way that it typically is on an iPad. The screen didn’t wow me immediately the way the redesign did, but it does look great.
It’s such a big difference that the larger model, which I’ve always felt was kind of preposterously huge, feels much more comfortable to hold and use. (And it’s technically even larger now, up to 13 inches from 12.9 before1) You can tell the difference between the Pro and the new Air from practically across the room, and as someone who has carried around an 11-inch Pro for the last year and a half, it’s really a big difference. I have a question about whether the new Pro is too thin. It feels rigid and sturdy enough in my hands, but there are always tradeoffs with a device like this. We have a lot of testing to do.
The Next-Generation iPad: What’s New in the Power of the Pencil, or How to Play with the Coolest Software?
As for the chip’s role in the whole thing? Well, we’ll have to see. For most uses, the iPad has always had enough power for intense use cases, like Final Cut Pro or even some of the more advanced artistic features in apps like Procreate. In a short demo, it was super fast. The iPad is pretty much always super fast.
The function keys at the top will make it a more useful keyboard and track pad machine in general. iPad OS is not a great operating system for the trackpad and we will have to wait for Apple to improve that.
The Pencil Pro… well, it feels like the Pencil. It was smooth and quick on the Pro’s screen as I drew and moved stuff around, and the addition of the haptic feedback is a nice addition to the setup. We are going to need someone to test this more thoroughly, because I am not an artist. Most of the coolest stuff is software, too, and a lot of the Pencil Pro’s best features will come from third-party developers.
At $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-incher, the iPad Pro is very much not the iPad for casual consumption — that would be the new iPad Air or even the now-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.
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. Now the wait is finally 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.
Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which will focus on new software features coming to its entire product line, is next month and the shift in strategy makes sense. In April it was reported by the Business Insider that a new slate of generativeai features will be included in the next version of the iPhone operating system and also that Apple was in talks with OpenAI to incorporate some of the company’s features.
