I was at Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ event today in London and I got some time to check out the new iPad Pro in all its glory alongside the more capable Apple Pencil Pro. After seeing it up close, it’s a serious upgrade for those who use an iPad Pro, especially if you do use an Apple Pencil for drawing or other close work.
The OLED display (labelled Ultra Retina XDR) is a real stunner and although it was difficult to get a proper impression under bright lights, it clearly was super bright and will be an incredible tool for viewing content with great contrast even though the peak brightness of 1600nits hasn’t increased over the previous generation.
What is particularly stunning is just how thin the iPad Pro is. It was pretty thin anyway, but the new 13 incher (no, not 12.9 anymore but 13) clocks in at a mere 5.1mm. It’s the thinnest product Apple has ever made, even more so than the iPad nano. Remarkable.
There’s also a nano-texture glass option for the 1TB and 2TB models should you want it – this is absolutely stunning to look at with super-low reflectivity even in a bright room.
There’s an 11in model as well still and both are available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB versions.
The reworked slab has Apple’s M4 chip on board as opposed to the widely expected M3 and it’s more graphically capable – it’s 3nm again, but it’s a ‘second generation’ manufacturing process. There’s a step up with this chip across the board, but there’s a redesigned CPU with extra efficiency cores as well as the neural engine.
And it’s 1.5x faster than M2 as well. But we feel like there have to be more reasons why Apple has stepped forward to M4 rather than using M3 and we reckon we’ll hear more about that at Apple’s developer conference next month.
We know there will be new AI-powered elements from Apple’s software side and it’s interesting to hear Apple using AI termology (like the AI PC) to replace the Machine Learning lingo it has used for years. In its press release the company says :M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today… M4 makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.” More to come here, we feel.
Even more Pro-level Pencil
The Apple Pencil Pro is also a new and somewhat impressive partner, too. It’s only compatible with the new iPad Air and Pro and it apparently has a new charging architecture, but in reality that capability works very similarly to the existing Pencil 2. It can be found using Apple FindMy, which is excellent news though!
The powerful part is that there’s a new sensor in the barrel that you can squeeze. This brings up a tool palette on the display that means you can switch brushes/tools as well as select line weights and colours. You can also double press to invoke the eraser. There’s also a gentle haptic engine with a light tap that provides confirmation, too – this all works really well and we found that by the second go we had got used to it.
Rotating the barrel changes the orientation of your selected tool and you can see that on the display with Apple Pencil Hover. If you want a cheaper Pencil, you can also choose the Apple Pencil USB-C, but because of the lack of pressure sensitivity, we’re not sure we’d recommend this unless it’s just for note-taking.
