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I’m a big fan of these short(ish) Apple events. At just under 40 minutes long, yesterday’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad announcement was packed with detail and free of cringey dad jokes.
More of this please, Tim.
We have new iPads – four to be exact. The iPad Air has been revamped with an M2 chip, sensible selfie camera positioning, and a brand-new, supersized 13-inch variant. Of all yesterday’s announcements, the latter feels like the killer release. Just £799 for what is basically the big iPad Pro, minus the stuff you’ll never make use of? Yes please!
Today, however, I want to talk about the iPad Pro. This is for one very simple reason: Apple has knowingly ushered us into one of the weirdest eras ever with the launch of its flagship tablet, and I desperately need to unpack my thoughts.
Introducing the M4 iPad Pro
The new iPad Pro is an absolute beast – albeit with one very Apple-like trick up its sleeve.
This is the thinnest device Apple has ever made. Not the thinnest iPad – the thinnest Apple product ever. It means the new iPad Pro is, hilariously, thinner than the iPod nano. If you’re interested, that’s 5.3mm for the 11-inch version and 5.1mm for the 13-inch version.
It does look very thin, too. Placed side-by-side with the M2 iPad Pro, the difference is noticeable. Why Apple has done this and placed such an emphasis on it is anyone’s guess, but as someone who once opened a brand-new iPad Pro only to find it bent, straight from the assembly line, I’ll tread cautiously with this one.
The display on the new iPad Pro is, as we suspected, an OLED panel. However, in true Apple style, it’s not just any ol’ OLED panel anyone could grab from a parts bin – this is a Tandem OLED display, which fuses two panels. They did this, apparently, to ensure the desired brightness could be sustained, and for the display itself to be deserving of a place within Apple’s lineup. If you’re wondering, that brightness peaks at 1,600 nits for HDR content. There’s also a nano-texture version for less glare (although, weirdly, Apple has decided to leave the bezels with a gloss finish).
Onto power, and this is where everything gets wonderfully weird. The new OLED iPad Pro (as noted by the leakers) doesn’t have an M3 chip. Instead, Apple has opted for a brand-new M4 chip which delivers performance that is four times faster overall than the M2 iPad Pro. Digging a little deeper, the CPU is 50% faster, and the 10-core GPU is capable of mesh shading and ray tracing – a first for the iPad.
Apple earmarked an inevitably prominent slot for the new neural engine, too. Capable of processing 38 trillion operations per second, it’s 60 times faster than the original neural engine in the A11 Bionic. We didn’t get to see what it’s capable of beyond automatically masking stuff in Final Cut Pro, but this tees things up nicely for WWDC.
However, the decision to put the M4 into the iPad Pro also shines the spotlight on another Apple product which received only the briefest of mentions at the start of the event.
Where does this leave the Mac?
During his opening remarks at the Let Loose event, Tim Cook provided a quick recap of the M3 MacBook Air launch from earlier this year. That was the only time he or any other Apple presenter referred to the Mac, to my knowledge.
This isn’t unusual – it was an iPad event, after all. But one does wonder what Apple would say about the Mac if asked to compare it with the new iPad Pro. We are, after all, now living in an era where Apple’s tablet is more powerful than the Mac.
Read that to yourself again.
Now, there are plenty of caveats here. We have no benchmarks to prove this is the case and, equally, an M3 Max MacBook Pro can be specced up to be far more powerful and more capable than the iPad Pro. They are also vastly different devices with entirely different operating systems powering them.
Regardless, the iPad does have a more up-to-date chip than its desktop counterpart. And I find that incredibly weird.
Has this happened before? I don’t think so; certainly not in the era of M-based Apple silicon, where the iPad has always followed a few footsteps behind the Mac in terms of generational upgrades.
It appears that the decision to use the M4 chip in the new iPad Pro was driven by two factors. The first is, according to Apple, that new Ultra Retina HDR OLED display. They tell us that, in order for the Tandem OLED panels to work perfectly in harmony and to deliver the desired display quality, they had to opt for a brand-new chip with the appropriate GPU capabilities. That makes sense; there’s no such thing as an OLED Mac. Yet.
The second reason the M4 exists in the new iPad Pro is the one we’d all been expecting: AI. The neural engine was indeed given a decent amount of time in the spotlight yesterday, but there are still plenty of questions that have been left unanswered.
That means only one thing.
Wrapping up: over to you, WWDC!
Last week, I suggested that Apple might break with tradition and reveal some new iPadOS stuff before WWDC kicks off next month.
They didn’t. Because of course they didn’t. We got to see new versions of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, but their presence at an iPad launch event makes far more sense than such an event usurping WWDC.
It feels like I say this every year, but iPadOS really does need to come of age in 2024. The iPad Pro has been ludicrously powerful ever since Apple decided to give it the M1 chip. That was in 2021. Three years later, we’re still waiting for significant updates to iPadOS that make use of all that power – which is now three generations advanced.
The numbers the M4 iPad Pro is capable of are bonkers. The claims of its superiority are substantial. It’s time for iPadOS to come along for the ride.
My review of the M4 iPad Pro will follow in due course – stay tuned.
