Apple Unveils New iPad Pro With Thin Design, Powerful AI Capabilities

Apple just unveiled their latest iPad lineup in a pre-recorded live streamed event from Apple HQ in Cupertino, and the star of the show was the all-new iPad Pro.

Available in silver and space black finishes, the new iPad Pro comes in two sizes: an expansive 13-inch model and a super-portable 11-inch model. Both sizes feature the world’s most advanced display, a new breakthrough Ultra Retina XDR display with state-of-the-art tandem OLED technology, providing a remarkable visual experience.

The new iPad Pro is made possible with the new M4 chip, the next generation of Apple silicon, which delivers a huge leap in performance and capabilities. The M4 features an entirely new display engine to enable the precision, color, and brightness of the Ultra Retina XDR display. With a new CPU, a next-generation GPU that builds upon the GPU architecture debuted on M3, and the most powerful Neural Engine yet, the new iPad Pro is an outrageously powerful device for artificial intelligence.

Considering that Apple’s latest MacBook lineup currently runs on the M3 chip, this is, as CEO Tim Cook put it, an “outrageously powerful chip for AI.”

Thinnest Apple Product Ever

The new iPad Pro — the thinnest Apple product ever — features a stunningly thin and light design, taking portability to a whole new level. The 11-inch model is just 5.3 mm thin, and the 13-inch model is even thinner at a striking 5.1 mm, while both models are just as strong as the previous design. The 11-inch model weighs less than a pound, and the 13-inch model is nearly a quarter pound lighter than its predecessor — allowing pro users to extend their workflows in new ways and in more places. The new iPad Pro is available in two gorgeous finishes — silver and space black — both with 100 percent recycled aluminum enclosures.

World’s Most Advanced Display

The new iPad Pro debuts the Ultra Retina XDR, the world’s most advanced display, to provide an even more remarkable visual experience. The Ultra Retina XDR display features state-of-the-art tandem OLED technology that uses two OLED panels and combines the light from both to provide phenomenal full-screen brightness. The new iPad Pro supports an incredible 1000 nits of full-screen brightness for SDR and HDR content, and 1600 nits peak for HDR. No other device of its kind delivers this level of extreme dynamic range. Tandem OLED technology enables sub-millisecond control over the color and luminance of each pixel, taking XDR precision further than ever.

Specular highlights in photos and video appear even brighter, and there’s more detail in shadows and low light than ever before on iPad, while delivering even more responsiveness to content in motion. For professional users working in high-end, color-managed workflows or challenging lighting conditions, a new nano-texture glass option comes to iPad Pro for the first time. Nano-texture glass is precisely etched at a nanometer scale, maintaining image quality and contrast while scattering ambient light for reduced glare. With its breakthrough tandem OLED technology, extreme brightness, incredibly precise contrast, brilliant colors, and nano-texture glass option, the new Ultra Retina XDR display is the world’s most advanced display, giving iPad Pro customers an unparalleled viewing experience.

Only Possible with M4

The incredibly thin and light design and game-changing display of the new iPad Pro is only possible with M4, the next generation of Apple silicon that delivers a huge leap in performance. M4 is built on second-generation 3-nanometer technology that’s even more power efficient, which is perfect for the design of the new iPad Pro. With an entirely new display engine, M4 introduces pioneering technology for the stunning precision, color, and brightness of the Ultra Retina XDR display.

The new CPU offers up to 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, with next-generation machine learning accelerators, to deliver up to 1.5x faster CPU performance over M2 in the previous-generation iPad Pro. M4 builds on the GPU architecture of M3 — the 10-core GPU includes powerful features like Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, which come to iPad for the first time. Coupled with higher unified memory bandwidth, pro rendering apps like Octane will see up to 4x faster performance than M2.3 M4 also delivers tremendous gains and industry-leading performance per watt.

Compared to the M2, the M4 can deliver the same performance using just half the power, and compared to the latest PC chip in a thin and light laptop, M4 can deliver the same performance using just a quarter of the power. A new advanced Media Engine includes support for AV1 decode, providing more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services.

Outrageously Powerful Device for AI

The new iPad Pro with M4 features Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever, capable of 38 trillion operations per second, which is 60x faster than Apple’s first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic chip. Combined with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, a high-performance GPU, more memory bandwidth, and intelligent features and powerful developer frameworks in iPadOS, the Neural Engine makes the new iPad Pro an outrageously powerful device for AI. With iPad Pro with M4, users can perform AI-enabled tasks even faster, like easily isolate a subject from its background in 4K video with just a tap with Scene Removal Mask in Final Cut Pro. With this advanced level of performance, the Neural Engine in M4 is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today.

iPadOS also has advanced frameworks like Core ML that make it easy for developers to tap into the Neural Engine to deliver phenomenal AI features locally, including running powerful diffusion and generative AI models, with great performance on device. iPad Pro also supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Adobe Firefly.

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Clearly, this is a huge step forward for the iPad Pro, and it should be interesting to see how it’s received. Couple this with the new Magic Keyboard ($299-349), and it’s essentially a laptop.

The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $999 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,199 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,299 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,499 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. Customers can order the new iPad Pro with M4 starting today, with availability in stores beginning Wednesday, May 15.