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Ever since Steve Jobs pulled a MacBook Air out of a paper envelope, Apple’s obsession with making its products as thin as humanly possible has been well-documented. Even by those precipitous standards, new Apple iPad Pro is a big (if svelte) deal. At just 5.1 millimeters thin, it's even slimmer than every millennial’s MP3 player of choice: the iPod Nano. Alas, it’s not yet available with a neon sock accessory to sate your Y2K nostalgia fix.
Launching today alongside a refreshed Magic Keyboard, Apple Pencil Pro and fine-tuned iPad Air, the new Apple iPad Pro comes with a suite of major technical improvements to match its new aesthetic. That means the debut of TV-worthy OLED display tech on a tablet and the introduction of Apple’s latest M4 chip, which arrives first on a tablet instead of a MacBook. Having gotten hands-on with the devices earlier today, we found out what's so great about the latest iPad Pro and why it's the biggest leap forward for these devices in the best part of a decade.
OLED comes to iPad
As you’ve probably gathered by now, these iPad Pros aren’t your standard specs bump. Aside from their 11- or 13-inch form factor, almost everything has changed about their design. In truth, any device that’s 5.1 millimeter thin will make for a snappy headline, but the most significant alterations to the Pro can be found elsewhere. Plan on spending the best part of the summer checking out BMXing at the Olympics or Andy Murray’s last dance at Wimbledon? The introduction of Apple’s Ultra Retina XDR display tech is the most immediately apparent upgrade.
Instead of simply transferring the same OLED display that’s already in your iPhone onto iPad, Apple has created a whole new panel to allow for visuals with dramatically improved contrast, greater detail when handling shadowy footage and a better grasp of onscreen motion. This is an iPad that can go toe-to-toe with the best 4K TVs available. Should you be minded to take the iPad Pro with you on your summer travels or do a lot of color grading work with it, a nano-texture glass technique is also available for reduced poolside and in-studio screen glare.
M4 is iPad-only
Although the iPad Pro is definitively not a laptop, it is Apple’s first device to be powered by the new M4 chip. Considering the brand’s MacBook Air and Pro laptops all still use variations on last year’s M3 chips to get the job done, this is a significant show of intent.
Anyone making the leap from 2022’s M2-powered iPad Pro will find a 50 percent faster performance when editing video, whipping up multi-layered sketches, and wasting a spare half hour in gaming apps. Catering to the more creative end of this spectrum is a new Apple Pencil Pro, which you can squeeze to enable different functions and comes with a built-in gyroscope for artistic flourishes such as a barrel roll between thick and thin sketch lines. An updated and significantly thinner Magic Keyboard has also been introduced for a superior typing experience that won’t weigh down your backpack quite so much this time around.
Lastly, because there are still folks who insist on taking photos on iPad, the Pro’s camera has been reimagined with a 12-megapixel lens, LIDAR scanner, and an adaptive two-tone flash. As much as this will all help you take a better holiday snap, you’re most likely to see the benefits with more practical work such as more easily scanned documents and capturing 3D spaces with one of the many augmented reality apps that are already available for iPad. Before the Apple Vision Pro came along, iPad was the proving ground for many AR developers. Now, we'd imagine it's a stepping stone to bigger spatial computing things.
iPad Pro (M4): Pricing and availability
So when can you get a new iPad Pro? Both new models are available to pre-order today and will begin shipping on May 15. The same goes for the latest iPad Airs, which now feature the "old" iPad Pro’s M2 chip and have been updated to support the Apple Pencil Pro. If you can't wait until reviews begin to drop for them, here’s a brief summary of all your buying options when it comes to the latest iPad.
