ipad pro

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Testing Apple’s M5 iPad Pro: Future-proofing for Apple’s perennial overkill tablet

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It’s a gorgeous tablet, but what does an iPad need with more processing power?

Apple’s 13-inch M5 iPad Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s 13-inch M5 iPad Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This year’s iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “internal refresh.” These refreshes are what Apple generally does for its products for one or two or more years after making a larger external design change. Leaving the physical design alone preserves compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.

For the Mac, chip refreshes are still pretty exciting to me, because many people who use a Mac will, very occasionally, assign it some kind of task where they need it to work as hard and fast as it can, for an extended period of time. You could be a developer compiling a large and complex app, or you could be a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you’re just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, and first- and third-party apps made to take advantage of that power and flexibility, mean that “more speed” is still exciting, even if it takes a few years for that speed to add up to something users will consistently notice and appreciate.

And then there’s the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple shifted to using the same M-series chips that it uses in Macs, most iPad Pro reviews contain some version of “this is great hardware that is much faster than it needs to be for anything the iPad does.” To wit, our review of the M4 iPad Pro from May 2024:

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Since then, Apple has announced and released iPadOS 26, an update that makes important and mostly welcome changes to how the tablet handles windowed multitasking, file transfers, and some other kinds of background tasks. But this is the kind of thing that isn’t even going to stress out an Apple M1, let alone a chip that’s twice as powerful.

All of this is to say: A chip refresh for an iPad is nice to have. This year’s will also come with a handy RAM increase for many buyers, the first RAM boost that the base model iPad Pro has gotten in more than four years.

But without any other design changes or other improvements to hang its hat on, the fact is that chip refresh years for the iPad Pro only really improve a part of the tablet that needs the least amount of improvement. That doesn’t make them bad; who knows what the hardware requirements will be when iPadOS 30 adds some other batch of multitasking features. But it does mean these refreshes don’t feel particularly exciting or necessary; the most exciting thing about the M5 iPad Pro means you might be able to get a good deal on an M4 model as retailers clear out their stock. You aren’t going to notice the difference.

Design: M4 iPad Pro redux

The 13-inch M5 iPad Pro in its Magic Keyboard accessory with the Apple Pencil Pro attached. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Lest we downplay this tablet’s design, the M4 version of the iPad Pro was the biggest change to the tablet since Apple introduced the modern all-screen design for the iPad Pro back in 2018. It wasn’t a huge departure, but it did introduce the iPad’s first OLED display, a thinner and lighter design, and a slightly improved Apple Pencil and updated range of accessories.

As with the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that Apple just launched, the easiest way to know how much you’ll like the iPad Pro depends on how you feel about screen technology (the iPad is, after all, mostly screen). If you care about the 120 Hz, high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen, the option to add a nano-texture display with a matte finish, and the infinite contrast and boosted brightness of Apple’s OLED displays, those are the best reasons to buy an iPad Pro. The $299/349 Magic Keyboard accessory for the iPad Pro also comes with backlit keys and a slightly larger trackpad than the equivalent $269/$319 iPad Air accessory.

If none of those things inspire passion in you, or if they’re not worth several hundred extra dollars to you—the nano-texture glass upgrade alone adds $700 to the price of the iPad Pro, because Apple only offers it on the 1TB and 2TB models—then the 11- and 13-inch iPads Air are going to give you a substantively identical experience. That includes compatibility with the same Apple Pencil accessory and support for all the same multitasking and Apple Intelligence features.

The M5 iPad Pro supports the same Apple Pencil Pro as the M4 iPad Pro, and the M2 and M3 iPad Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One other internal change to the new iPad Pro, aside from the M5, is mostly invisible: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread connectivity provided by the Apple N1 chip, and 5G cellular connectivity provided by the Apple C1X. Ideally, you won’t notice this swap at all, but it’s a quietly momentous change for Apple. Both of these chips cap several years of acquisitions and internal development, and further reduce Apple’s reliance on external chipmakers like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which has been one of the goals of Apple’s A- and M-series processors all along.

There’s one last change we haven’t really been able to adequately test in the handful of days we’ve had the tablet: new fast-charging support, either with Apple’s first-party Dynamic Power Adapter or any USB-C charger capable of providing 60 W or more of power. When using these chargers, Apple says the tablet’s battery can charge from 0 to 50 percent in 35 minutes. (Apple provides the same battery life estimates for the M5 iPads as the M4 models: 10 hours of Wi-Fi web usage, or 9 hours of cellular web usage, for both the 13- and 11-inch versions of the tablet.)

Two Apple M5 chips, two RAM options

Apple sent us the 1TB version of the 13-inch iPad Pro to test, which means we got the fully enabled version of the M5: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency GPU cores, 10 GPU cores, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 16GB of RAM.

Apple’s Macs still offer individually configurable processor, storage, and RAM upgrades to users—generally buying one upgrade doesn’t lock you into buying a bunch of other stuff you don’t want or need (though there are exceptions for RAM configurations in some of the higher-end Macs). But for the iPads, Apple still ties the chip and the RAM you get to storage capacity. The 256GB and 512GB iPads get three high-performance CPU cores instead of four, and 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB.

For people who buy the 256GB and 512GB iPads, this does amount to a 50 percent increase in RAM capacity from the M1, M2, and M4 iPad Pro models, or the M1, M2, and M3 iPad Airs, all of which came with 8GB of RAM. High-end models stick with the same 16GB of RAM as before (no 24GB or 32GB upgrades here, though the M5 supports them in Macs). The ceiling is in the same place, but the floor has come up.

Given that iPadOS is still mostly running on tablets with 8GB or less of RAM, I don’t expect the jump from 8GB to 12GB to make a huge difference in the day-to-day experience of using the tablet, at least for now. If you connect your iPad to an external monitor that you use as an extended display, it might help keep more apps in memory at a time; it could help if you edit complex multi-track audio or video files or images, or if you’re trying to run some kind of machine learning or AI workflows locally. Future iPadOS versions could also require more than 8GB of memory for some features. But for now, the benefit exists mostly on paper.

As for benchmarks, the M5’s gains in the iPad are somewhat more muted than they are for the M5 MacBook Pro we tested. We observed a 10 or 15 percent improvement across single- and multi-core CPU tests and graphics benchmark improvements that mostly hovered in the 15 to 30 percent range. The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark was one outlier, pointing to a 35 percent increase in GPU performance; it’s possible that GPU or rendering-heavy workloads benefit a little more from the new neural accelerators in the M5’s GPU cores than games do.

In the MacBook review, we observed that the M5’s CPU generally had higher peak power consumption than the M4. In the fanless iPad Pro, it’s likely that Apple has reined the chip in a little bit to keep it cool, which would explain why the iPad’s M5 doesn’t see quite the same gains.

The M5 and the 12GB RAM minimum does help to put a little more distance between the M3 iPad Air and the Pros. Most iPad workloads don’t benefit in an obvious user-noticeable way from the extra performance or memory right now, but it’s something you can point to that makes the Pro more “pro” than the Air.

Changed hardware that doesn’t change much

The M5 iPad Pro is nice in the sense that “getting a little more for your money today than you could get for the same money two weeks ago” is nice. But it changes essentially nothing for potential iPad buyers.

I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who would be well-served by the M5 iPad Pro who wouldn’t have been equally well-served by the M4 version. And if the M4 iPad Pro was already overkill for you, the M5 is just a little more so. Particularly if you have an M1 or M2 ; People with an A12X or A12Z version of the iPad Pro from 2018 or 2020 will benefit more, particularly if you’re multitasking a lot or running into limitations or RAM complaints from the apps you’re using.

But even with the iPadOS 26 update, it still seems like the capabilities of the iPad’s software lags behind the capabilities of the hardware by a few years. It’s to be expected, maybe, for an operating system that has to run on this M5 iPad Pro and a 7-year-old phone processor with 3GB of RAM.

I am starting to feel the age of the M1 MacBook Air I use, especially if I’m pushing multiple monitors with it or trying to exceed its 16GB RAM limit. The M1 iPad Air I have, on the other hand, feels like it just got an operating system that unlocks some of its latent potential. That’s the biggest problem with the iPad Pro, really—not that it’s a bad tablet, but that it’s still so much more tablet than you need to do what iPadOS and its apps can currently do.

The good

  • A fast, beautiful tablet that’s a pleasure to use.
  • The 120Hz ProMotion support and OLED display panel make this one of Apple’s best screens, period.
  • 256GB and 512GB models get a bump from 8GB to 12GB of memory.
  • Maintains compatibility with the same accessories as the M4 iPad Pro.

The bad

  • More iPad than pretty much anyone needs.
  • Passively cooled fanless Apple M5 can’t stretch its legs quite as much as the actively cooled Mac version.
  • Expensive accessories.

The ugly

  • All other hardware upgrades, including the matte nano-texture display finish, require a $600 upgrade to the 1TB version of the tablet.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Testing Apple’s M5 iPad Pro: Future-proofing for Apple’s perennial overkill tablet Read More »

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Apple unveils M5 update for the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros

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A couple of weeks ago, a YouTuber unboxed what appeared to be a refreshed iPad Pro in full retail packaging, suggesting it would be launching imminently. Today, Apple formally announced the new tablets, and it looks like pretty much everything uncovered by that YouTuber turned out to be accurate.

The new iPad Pros, powered by Apple’s also-new M5 chip, use the same basic designs as the M4 iPad Pros from last year and are compatible with the same cases and accessories. The new iPad Pro starts at $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-inch model, is available for pre-order today, and ships on October 22.

Apple’s M5 is similar in composition to the M4—the fully enabled version uses four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine. But a memory bandwidth increase, from 120GB/s for the M4 to 153GB/s for the M5, enables a disproportionately large 45 percent increase to graphics performance, according to Apple’s estimates. Apple’s press release also highlighted improvements to storage performance, with “up to 2x faster storage read and write speeds.”

Apple unveils M5 update for the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros Read More »

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Apple’s $349 iPad 11 is missing a lot, but it’s still all the iPad most people need

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apologies to the ipad pro

Other iPads are nicer and faster, but I end up using all of them the same way.

The basic iPad’s Apple Pencil situation is most charitably described as “sub-optimal.” Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The basic iPad’s Apple Pencil situation is most charitably described as “sub-optimal.” Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple released a new version of the basic $349 iPad this week, though you could be forgiven for not noticing. The new 11th-generation iPad (also known as the “iPad (A16)” or just plain-old “iPad”) looks identical to the previous version, it was introduced in a single paragraph buried in the middle of an iPad Air announcement, and the company didn’t offer to send any to reviewers. The one I have I bought myself for our 5-year-old, whose hand-me-down 2019 iPad Air 3 is slightly older than he is and a little worse for wear.

There’s nothing exciting or even particularly interesting about this tablet. The design is recycled from 2022’s 10th-generation iPad, which was itself a lower-rent version of the 2020 iPad Air design. It’s powered by a variant of the Apple A16, originally an iPhone chip from 2022. It still doesn’t support the regular Apple Pencil or Pencil Pro or the same keyboard accessories as other iPads. It still doesn’t have an anti-reflective screen coating, and the screen doesn’t feel as nice to use as an iPad Air’s or Pro’s.

But for all that, this is still probably the purest expression of what the iPad is: a cheap Internet-connected screen for reading and watching things. I say this as someone who has tried every new piece of hardware and software that Apple has introduced to try and make the iPad a powerful and versatile laptop replacement—it still feels like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. The more expensive iPads are nice, but I don’t end up using them much differently from how I use this bare-bones tablet.

Features and limitations

Apple’s 11th-generation iPad, with a USB-C Apple Pencil and a cheap case/cover. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The A16 iPad is a typical post-Home-button iPad design, with a slim-ish symmetrical bezel running all the way around a 10.86-inch screen. Apple used to round this up to 10.9 inches, and now it rounds it up to 11 inches, but what has changed is the rounding and not the screen size.

A Touch ID fingerprint reader is embedded in the power button; the headphone jack is gone; the iPad branding has been removed from the back; and there’s a USB-C port on the bottom (one benefit of upgrading for me—the old iPad Air was the last Lightning device in the house, give or take a Magic Trackpad or Apple TV remote). The design hasn’t changed at all, which means any accessory made for the 10th-gen A14 iPad should fit this one without issue.

This screen ends up feeling like the biggest downgrade from an iPad Air, not because of its size or quality but because of the air gap between the front glass and the actual LCD panel. Other iPads have “laminated” screens, which means that the LCD panel and the glass are fused. This slightly improves color and contrast at the expense of repairability—with a laminated screen, cracked glass means you’re replacing the screen and the glass, not just the screen—but mainly, it makes the tablets feel more solid, and when you’re touching and drawing, it helps your fingers and Pencil feel closer to what you’re interacting with on screen. The air gap between the glass and the screen makes the iPad feel hollow. Along with the lack of anti-reflective coating, it’s the downgrade you’ll feel the most.

Apple’s reliance on older and slower internal hardware also means that the 11th-gen iPad is missing some of the features present on more expensive iPads, though I don’t currently view any of these features as essential. One is Stage Manager, the updated (and widely panned) multitasking experience introduced in iPadOS 16. One component of Stage Manager is actual multi-display support that can run iPad apps on an external screen; without Stage Manager, the iPad is limited to the traditional “video playback and display mirroring only” support.

A basic, flash-less, single-lens 12 megapixel camera and power button-mounted Touch ID sensor. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple Intelligence is also missing here, even though it’s a feature Apple has gone out of its way to include on every device it has launched since last fall (including the iPhone 16e). Again, none of these features are especially great, and some of them are actually kind of bad, so I don’t feel their absence here. If anything, some people might consider it a plus not to have Apple Intelligence flipping itself back on every time you install a security update. If and when Apple ever releases its delayed Siri update, maybe you’ll be sorry your iPad doesn’t support Apple Intelligence, but for now, there’s not much to miss.

One thing that remains frustrating is the Apple Pencil situation. Apple offers two options: the $79 USB-C Apple Pencil, which attaches to the side of the iPad magnetically but doesn’t pair or charge magnetically and doesn’t offer pressure sensitivity, or the $99 first-generation Apple Pencil, which does support pressure sensitivity but is a decade-old design that is less comfortable to hold, doesn’t attach to the tablet at all, and can’t even pair or charge without an adapter. A USB-C Apple Pencil with pressure sensitivity would be an acceptable compromise here; using the deeply flawed first-gen Apple Pencil to fill that gap is just unacceptable at this point.

Apple has removed the “iPad” text and regulatory markings from the back of this iPad, making it a blank aluminum slab aside from the camera bump and Apple logo. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Accessory pricing is another sore point. All of Apple’s cases and accessories run a bit expensive for my taste, but it’s particularly egregious for a budget tablet. The iPad does have a Smart Connector for Apple’s Magic Keyboard Folio, which at its normal retail price adds a staggering $249 to the price of your $349 iPad. Apple also has a regular Smart Folio case for the iPad, offering a foldable screen-cover-turned-stand and basic back protection for $79.

Luckily, third-party accessories can step in here and keep your total price close to or below $500, even if you’re trying to use the iPad as a computer. Logitech’s Combo Touch keyboard case adds a keyboard and trackpad for $160 and goes on sale with some regularity. Logitech also has separate Bluetooth keyboards like the $30-ish Pebble Keys 2 (formerly the K380s) or $50-ish Pop Icon Keys that can turn the iPad into a good writing machine for less money. MoKo’s iPad cases are decent and cheap and can add a touch of color or personalization. The best feature of the iPad is the price—don’t let expensive accessories mess that up.

Performance: A16 non-Bionic, plus more storage and RAM

Look at the “Chip” section on Apple’s spec pages for the iPhone 15 and the iPad 11, and you’ll note that the iPad’s A16 is missing the word “Bionic.”

Originally used to denote a chip with a mix of large high-performance CPU cores and small high-efficiency CPU cores, Apple has been dropping this label for new A-series processors for a while now (the A17 and A18 don’t use it at all). But in the new iPad’s case, it seems meant to denote that this is a slightly cut-down iteration of the A16, with five CPU cores instead of six and four GPU cores instead of three.

Benchmarks for the 10th-gen iPad have been pulled from publicly available numbers in each benchmark’s official results database.

Geekbench 6 doesn’t distinguish between the performance and efficiency cores, but it does say that the iPad has one cluster of two cores and one cluster of three cores. That means it’s likely one of the four efficiency cores that have been disabled, so the impact on the day-to-day user experience should be pretty minimal.

Performance in benchmarks is “faster, but not by much.” In our testing, the new iPad is still substantially slower than the M1 iPad Air from 2022. And using benchmarks pulled from public databases, it looks like a measurable but modest upgrade over the A14 Bionic in the 10th-generation iPad: a 20 percent-ish improvement in single- and multi-core CPU performance and between 15 and 30 percent faster graphics performance (depending on the benchmark). It’s good enough to be a kid’s Roblox machine, but it might struggle a bit with newer or more intensive games and apps.

The new iPad’s best spec upgrades are measured in gigabytes—the base model jumps from 64GB to 128GB of storage, and RAM increases from 4GB to 6GB. While still short of the unstated 8GB RAM requirement for Stage Manager or Apple Intelligence, that’s two extra gigabytes of memory the iPad can use for apps and Safari tabs before it has to start ejecting things from RAM to make more room. If you’re upgrading from something older, like 2021’s 9th-gen iPad or the iPad Air 3 we’ve been using, you’re doubling your memory from 3GB to 6GB. Not exciting, but not too shabby.

Still the default iPad

A cheap cover and Bluetooth keyboard can still turn the cheap iPad into a solid writing machine (not this keyboard, which is a Logitech MX Keys S I bought for something else, but an inexpensive Logitech Pebble Keys 2 or Pop Icon Keys are both good fits). Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The next time I buy an iPad for myself, I will still probably manage to talk myself into some kind of iPad Air. I occasionally need to test and write about the full range of iPad features, including Stage Manager and Apple Intelligence, and the laminated screen and anti-reflective coating are quality-of-life upgrades I’m pretty attached to. Sometimes, you spend a little more money on a nice thing because it is nice, even if it’s not strictly necessary.

But for just over half the price? For people who are just reading or doodling or watching TV, or for a kid who needs something basic but reliable for games and school and chatting? The basic iPad makes a strong case for itself. That was already kind of true of the 10th-generation iPad, which debuted at a who-is-this-for price of $449 before gradually falling to a more sensible $349 last year. This new iPad is just that one with a faster chip, 50 percent more memory, and 100 percent more storage.

It is a little frustrating that Apple couldn’t at least give people the option to use Apple Intelligence since the cheap iPad only sees an update once every couple of years—if there ever actually is a killer Apple Intelligence feature, this iPad won’t see it. But don’t let the tablet’s whisper-quiet, nothing-to-see-here launch or low price fool you—it still does pretty much all of the stuff that people actually enjoy doing on their iPads.

The good

  • A reliable, functional multi-purpose computer for $349
  • More RAM and double the storage of the previous-generation model
  • Decent performance and a nice-looking screen for this price
  • iPadOS has a solid library of games, productivity apps, and other software that Android and Windows tablets have never successfully replicated
  • Compatible with the same ecosystem of accessories as the 10th-generation model

The bad

  • You have two Apple Pencil options, and neither is ideal
  • Still slower than a 3-year-old M1 iPad Air
  • Apple’s accessories can drive the price way up
  • No Apple Intelligence, I guess? You’re not missing anything now, but you might one day miss out on a feature you actually want

The ugly

  • The gap between the glass and the screen gives it a hollow feeling and makes drawing less satisfying

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Apple’s $349 iPad 11 is missing a lot, but it’s still all the iPad most people need Read More »

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M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off

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The back of an iPad with its Apple logo centered

Enlarge / The 2024, M4-equipped 13-inch iPad Pro.

Samuel Axon

The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.

It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone or Watch, and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Specifications

There are some notable design changes in the 2024 iPad Pro, but really, it’s all about the specs—and it’s a more notable specs jump than usual in a couple of areas.

M4

First up, there’s the M4 chip. The previous iPad Pro had an M2 chip, and the latest Mac chip is the M3, so not only did the iPad Pro jump two whole generations, but this is the first time it has debuted the newest iteration of Apple Silicon. (Previously, new M-series chips launched on the Mac first and came to the iPad Pro a few months later.)

Using second-generation 3 nm tech, the M4’s top configuration has a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core NPU. In that configuration, the 10-core CPU has four performance cores and six efficiency cores.

A lower configuration of the M4 has just nine CPU cores—three performance and six efficiency. Which one you get is tied to how much storage you buy. 256GB and 512GB models get nine CPU cores, while 1TB and 2TB get 10. Additionally, the two smaller storage sizes have 8GB of RAM to the larger ones’ 16GB.

This isn’t the first time Apple has tied RAM to storage configurations, but doing that with CPU cores is new for the iPad. Fortunately, the company is upfront about all this in its specs sheet, whereas the RAM differentiation wasn’t always clear to buyers in the past. (Both configurations claim 120GB/s memory bandwidth, though.)

Can the M4 help the iPad Pro bridge the gap between laptop and tablet? Mostly, it made me excited to see the M4 in a laptop.

Enlarge / Can the M4 help the iPad Pro bridge the gap between laptop and tablet? Mostly, it made me excited to see the M4 in a laptop.

Samuel Axon

Regardless of the specific configuration, the M4 promises substantially better CPU and GPU performance than the M2, and it supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing via Metal, which some games and applications can take advantage of if developers put in the work to make it happen. (It looked great in a demo of Diablo Immortal I saw, but it’s unclear how often we’ll actually see it in the wild.)

Apple claims 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2 and up to 4x faster graphics performance specifically on applications that involve new features like ray-tracing or hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It hasn’t made any specific GPU performance claims beyond those narrow cases.

A lot of both Apple’s attention and that of the media is focused on the Neural Engine, which is what Apple calls the NPU in the M-series chips. That’s because the company is expected to announce several large language model-based AI features in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS at its developer conference next month, and this is the chip that will power some of that on the iPad and Mac.

Some neat machine-learning features are already possible on the M4—you can generate audio tracks using certain instruments in your Logic Pro projects, apply tons of image optimizations to photos with just a click or two, and so on.

M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off Read More »

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Hands-on with the new iPad Pros and Airs: A surprisingly refreshing refresh

Apple, Features, iPad Air, ipad pro, Tech / /
Apple's latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro.

Enlarge / Apple’s latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple has a new lineup of iPad Pro and Air models for the first time in well over a year. Most people would probably be hard-pressed to tell the new ones from the old ones just by looking at them, but after hands-on sessions with both sizes of both tablets, the small details (especially for the Pros) all add up to a noticeably refined iPad experience.

iPad Airs: Bigger is better

But let’s begin with the new Airs since there’s a bit less to talk about. The 11-inch iPad Air (technically the sixth-generation model) is mostly the same as the previous-generation A14 and M1 models, design-wise, with identical physical dimensions and weight. It’s still the same slim-bezel design Apple introduced with the 2018 iPad Pro, just with a 60 Hz LCD display panel and Touch ID on the power button rather than Face ID.

So when Apple says the device has been “redesigned,” the company is mainly referring to the fact that the webcam is now mounted on the long edge of the tablet rather than the short edge. This makes its positioning more laptop-y when it’s docked to the Magic Keyboard or some other keyboard.

The most welcome change to the Air is the introduction of a 13-inch model (blessedly, no longer “12.9 inches”). It looks like the old 12.9-inch iPad Pro design from circa 2018 but with the simpler single-lens 12 MP camera and the Touch ID button rather than the Face ID sensor.

The new iPad Air.

Enlarge / The new iPad Air.

Andrew Cunningham

With the iPad Pro and the Air next to each other, it’s clear which has the superior screen—the 120 Hz refresh rate of ProMotion and the infinite contrast of OLED are definitely major points in the Pro’s favor. But if you’re just looking for a big screen for watching videos, reading books, or playing games, or if you’re just looking for a general-use laptop replacement tablet, Apple is still using a great 60 Hz LCD panel here. And the $799 price tag is considerably lower than any of Apple’s past 12.9-inch iPad Pros.

Like the 15-inch MacBook Air, it’s a way for people to get a bigger screen without paying for advanced screen technologies or faster processors if they don’t want or need them. It’s hard to find a downside to that, as long as you’re OK with iPadOS’ differences and restrictions relative to macOS.

Hands-on with the new iPad Pros and Airs: A surprisingly refreshing refresh Read More »

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New iPad Pros are the thinnest Apple device ever, feature dual-OLED screens

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Apple spring event 2024 —

They also contain what Apple calls the fastest consumer AI computer you can buy.

–

New iPad Pros are the thinnest Apple device ever, feature dual-OLED screens

Apple

Apple’s newest iPad Pro puts an M4 chip inside a thinner frame and is available in new 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, while also upgrading the screens on both to “tandem” OLED displays for more brightness.

Compared to the last iPad Pro, released in early 2022, Apple is highlighting how thin and light these new Pros are. The 11-inch model is 5.3 mm thick and weighs less than a pound, while the 13-inch is 5.1 mm, which Apple says is its thinnest product ever, at 1.28 pounds.

The tandem OLED design, dubbed Ultra Retina XDR, delivers 1000 nits at full-screen brightness, and 1600 nits at peak HDR, equivalent to a high-end Samsung TV. The screens are “nano-texture glass,” which is essentially a matte display finish.

What’s really big is the inclusion of an M4 chip, built from a second-generation 3-nanometer process. It’s the first time the iPad Pro has included a new Apple chip ahead of other devices. Apple is touting a 50 percent improvement over M2 performance and can deliver the same performance as M2 at half the power, or one-quarter the power in certain scenarios. Notably, the new iPad Air uses the M2; this year’s lineup puts more of a gap between the use cases and price/performance points of the various iPads, even if there is still some cross-over.

The chip’s neural engine got a very specific call-out; it’s capable of 38 trillion operations per second, and Apple says it’s the most powerful (consumer-level) AI computer sold.

The new iPad Pros get a 12 megapixel camera, along with LIDAR scanners and an adaptive flash that improves document scanning. Finally, the “selfie”/conferencing camera moves to the landscape position on the iPad Pro, making that ultra-wide 12MP camera far more useful and the iPad-as-laptop experience a good deal better. On that note, there are new Magic Keyboards, Smart Folios, and an Apple Pencil Pro available soon to attach to these new models.

The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $999, and the 13-inch starts at $1,299, with 256GB storage to start. They’re both available for order today, with delivery next week.

This is a developing story and this post will be updated.

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What to expect from Apple’s May 7 “Let loose” event

Apple, Apple M3, apple m4, apple pencil, Apple silicon, ipad, iPad Air, ipad pro, iPadOS, iPadOS 17.5, Tech / /
A colorful Apple log with an Apple Pencil inside it, with the copy

Enlarge / The promotional image for Apple’s May 7 event.

Apple

On May 7, Apple will host a product announcement event at 9 am ET. Labeled “Let loose,” we expect it will focus on new iPads and iPad accessories.

We won’t be liveblogging the stream, but you can expect some news coverage as it happens. Below, we’ll go over our educated guesses about why Apple might be doing this.

Why hold an event now?

It’s unusual for Apple to host an event shortly before WWDC. New products debut at that event all the time, so if it’s just a faster chip and a nicer screen for the iPad Pro and iPad Air, why not wait until June?

We’re not completely sure what the answer is, but we can make educated guesses.

Apple has been criticized by commentators over the past few weeks for three things. First, iPads have not been selling well. Second: While the Vision Pro introduced a new product category that may grow over time, its initial launch didn’t sell that well. Lastly, Apple is perceived by many as way, way behind on generative AI tech, which is already transforming other companies. There have also been rumors that Microsoft might announce a new silicon that will be fiercely competitive with Apple Silicon for AI tasks, and Microsoft’s chips could be announced at a planned event between May 7 and the start of WWDC.

Given all that, our best guess is that Apple wants to focus its messaging—and the time window for that messaging—on the right targets without muddying the message by trying to address everything at once.

Talking about the iPad’s challenges while also preempting Microsoft with a new chip announcement could be Apple’s focus for this event. Getting those things out of the way now would allow WWDC and its new operating system announcements to focus heavily on AI, which is the bigger question the company is looking to answer.

What new iPads might look like

Given that an Apple Pencil is in the event’s promotional image—a much more explicit hint than Apple usually provides—there’s no question iPads will be a focus.

As is often the case these days, we have a plethora of leaks, supply chain reports, and, of course, insider reporting at sites like Bloomberg and The Information to give us a rough idea of what to expect from Apple’s new hardware.

iPad Pro

It’s likely that the star of the show will be a significant redesign of the iPad Pro for the 11-inch and 12.9-inch sizes.

Both are rumored to get OLED displays, a huge step up over the LCD display in the current 11-inch iPad Pro. The 12.9-inch iPad Pro has a MiniLED display, which competes directly with OLED in the consumer TV space, so it won’t be as big a leap for that device, but we can still expect better contrast and richer colors.

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Report: Redesigned M3 iPad Pros, large-screened iPad Air now expected in May

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the wait continues —

Next-gen iPads will be Apple’s first new tablets since late 2022.

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The M2 iPad Pro. The updated version will come with refined designs and new accessories.

Enlarge / The M2 iPad Pro. The updated version will come with refined designs and new accessories.

Apple

If you’ve been waiting for new iPads to come out, prepare to wait just a little longer: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that redesigned iPad Pros with Apple’s M3 chip, plus refreshed iPad Air models with the M2 and a larger-screened option, should now arrive sometime in “early May.” Gurman had previously reported that new iPads could arrive in March or April, not long after the updated M3 MacBook Airs.

Gurman suggests that “complex new manufacturing techniques” for the new iPad screens have “contributed to the delay,” and that Apple is also “working to finish software for the devices.”

The details of what the new iPads will look like hasn’t changed. The new iPad Pro models will shift to using OLED display panels for the first time and will have their designs tweaked for the first time since the 2018 iPad Pros introduced the current rounded, slim-bezeled look. Those new iPad Pros will also come with redesigned Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil accessories, though it’s unclear whether those accessories will be totally rethought or if they’ll just tweak existing designs to work with the new tablets.

The iPad Air refresh will be more straightforward. It should retain the current design, which is very similar to the 2018-era iPad Pro refresh but with a power button-mounted TouchID fingerprint sensor instead of a FaceID camera for authentication. But the new Airs will come with an M2 chip instead of the current M1, and a 12.9-inch variant will provide a less-expensive large-screened option for people who want to use their iPad as their primary computer but who don’t want to pay for the extra bells and whistles of the Pro.

Some rumors have suggested the iPad Pro could come with a price hike relative to the current-generation model, though the sources of those rumors can’t agree on how big a jump it would be. Gurman hasn’t mentioned Apple’s pricing plans in his reports.

There’s also no word about the other tablets in Apple’s lineup, all of which are at least a year or two old. The sixth-generation iPad mini and the $329 ninth-generation iPad were last updated in September 2021, while the awkwardly positioned 10th-generation iPad was released in October 2022.

New hardware is always nice to have, but it does continue to feel like the power of Apple’s M-series chips is a bit wasted on Apple’s tablets. The iPad’s relatively limited multitasking model, restrictions on third-party software and the general dearth of performance-intensive high-end apps in Apple’s app store mean that performance really isn’t a problem on current-generation iPads; there’s nothing an iPad can currently do that an M1 can’t handle with room to spare. Apple will announce new operating system versions at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on June 10; it’s possible that iPadOS will get some new features that more fully leverage the power of Apple’s newer chips.

Report: Redesigned M3 iPad Pros, large-screened iPad Air now expected in May Read More »