Apple’s iPad Pro might just be the absolute ideal in highly portable photo editing workflow hardware.
It’s a robustly powerful tablet that can do all kinds of things for all kinds of users, but it’s hard to resist the obvious conclusions about its usefulness as a compact, powerful tool for editing photos and even videos while on the go.
Apple has really raised the bar with this latest-generation iPad thanks to an extremely impressive new display and the wonderfully powerful M4 chip buried inside the slim new iPad Pro’s body.
The new Pro model of the iPad is available in both 11-inch and 13-inch editions and is now lighter and thinner than it’s ever been.
In other words, it’s both the most powerful and the most portable Apple release of such an iPad so far, and that’s one very handy combination to have in your hands.
The most immediately, visibly wonderful thing to behold about the new iPad Pro is obviously its display.
This iPad Pro contains a “groundbreaking” new Retina XDR screen that incorporates advanced tandem OLED technology for very impressive brightness and essentially perfect contrast.
The screen can reach up to a beak brightness of 1000 nits for SDR content and if this isn’t impressive enough, it can also really push boundaries (for such a small screen) by outputting up to 1600 nits in HDR mode.
These specs alone allow for exceptionally realistic visuals and incredible rendering of both shadows and light.
Apple is also offering an option for the iPad Pro with something called nano-texture glass, which reduces glare still further for work in difficult field conditions.
Color delivery in the new iPad Pro’s XDR display is also fantastically vibrant and offers rich HDR colors with high-precision color accuracy and rendering.
Then there’s the M4 chipset inside the 2024 iPad Pro. This is possibly the new device’s single strongest selling point though its benefits aren’t as immediately obvious as those of the display.
With the M4 chip, Apple has also pushed the boundaries by building it with a new 3-nanometer process that provides previously impossible power efficiency and performance.
The new chip boasts a display engine that’s designed specifically for making the most of the 2024 iPad’s Ultra Retina XDR screen.
The M4 includes both a more powerful CPU and a more powerful GPU than those of its predecessor. In practical terms, this translates to 1.5x better CPU performance and 4x better rendering for pro applications.
The new chip also includes Apple’s new Neural Engine, which increases AI processing speed by 60x over what the A11 Bionic chip could do in previous Apple devices.
The above makes the iPad Pro into one extremely vigorous photo, video, and graphic editing tool across the board.
However, Apple has also given the 2024 iPad Pro its own camera upgrades for images and video taken directly with the device itself.
The back camera is a 12MP model that can take smart HDR images and video with high low-light performance. It’s also designed for efficient document scanning through True Tone flash, which enhances documents (and images taken of physical photos or graphics) with shadow compensation.
Then there’s the iPad’s TrueDepth front camera, which is optimized for video conferencing and high-quality selfies.
Finally, the new 2024 iPad Pro comes with an improved Apple Pencil Pro and a Magic Keyboard. Both of these make editing workflows in the new Apple device particularly smooth and fluid.
In the case of the Apple Pencil Pro, it includes a pressure-sensitive barrel that activates a whole tool palette for smoothly switching between different brushes, pens and other software tools inside the iPad.
The OS of the new iPad Pro is iPadOS 17 and includes Reference Mode for work that requires high color editing precision. It also comes with a whole range of possibly useful AI features that some users might like.
Also, in case you’re wondering about the details of the battery life of the new iPad models, Apple is claiming a solid run time of at least 10 hours of full use.
Specifically, the two iPad versions offer the following battery capacities:
iPad Pro 11″ M4 (2024) battery capacity – ~8,300 mAh
iPad Pro 13″ M4 (2024) battery capacity – ~10,340 mAh
Apple has made its iPad Pro 2024 editions available for preorder now and both will start shipping as of next week.
The 13-inch model retails for $1,299 while the 11-inch edition goes for $999. These are prices for the base edition with 256GB of storage.
There are also 512GB, 1TB and 2TB options available at higher prices.
As for the Nano-texture glass, it can only be ordered for the 1TB and 2TB models of either iPad Pro with an extra $100 price tag.
Apple’s Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro are unfortunately also sold separately and fairly pricey at that.
The keyboard costs $299 for the 11-inch iPad’s version and $349 for the 13-inch model’s Magic Keyboard. The Apple Pencil Pro on the other hand goes for a more reasonable price of $129.
All of the above start shipping at the same time as the new iPad Pro editions.
Yes, the new iPad Pro 2024 editions are on the expensive side and especially so if you go for all of their accessory options too, but they definitely promise incredible, almost unbeatable portable visual editing and workflow performance.
