The Tandem LCD Screen of the Pro Pro Plus Air: A First Look at a Larger, Bigger, Better, Brighter, Sharper Display
The new Pro’s most notable new spec, other than its waif dimensions, is the new OLED screen. It’s a little tough to make too much of exactly how it looks based on a quick glance in a crowded room, but even from a distance, it’s clear how much crisper the display really is. The display of the Tandem is bright, and viewing angles are good, similar to what you would find on an iPad. The redesign looked great, but the screen did not impress me immediately.
It’s such a big difference that the larger model is more comfortable to hold and use. (And it’s technically even larger now, up to 13 inches from 12.9 before1) You can tell the difference between the Pro and the new Air from practically across the room, and as someone who has carried around an 11-inch Pro for the last year and a half, it’s really a big difference. The biggest question I have for now is about fragility: is the new Pro potentially too thin? It feels rigid and sturdy enough in my hands, but there are always tradeoffs with a device like this. We have a lot of testing to do.
The Next-Generation iPad Pro: All-New M4 Chip, Accessories, and the Predictions for Apple’s e-Device
The whole thing is powered by the M4 chip. Well, we’ll have to see. For most uses, the iPad has had more than enough horsepower for a long time — the M4 is clearly meant to power extremely intense use cases, like the new multicam setup in Final Cut Pro or some of the more advanced artistic features in apps like Procreate. It was very fast in the demo. The iPad is very fast.
And there’s now a row of function keys at the top, which will make it a much more useful keyboard-and-trackpad machine in general. (Though iPadOS is still not a particularly great operating system for the trackpad in particular, but we’ll have to wait for WWDC to see if Apple improves that.)
The Pencil Pro… well, it feels like the Pencil. You definitely feel the haptic feedback when you squeeze or double-tap, which is a nice addition to the setup, and it was smooth and fast on the Pro’s screen as I drew and moved stuff around. I do not feel like an artist so we need someone to test this more thoroughly. Most of the coolest stuff is software, too, and a lot of the Pencil Pro’s best features will come from third-party developers.
At $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-incher, the iPad Pro is very much not the iPad for casual consumption — that would be the new iPad Air or even the now-cheaper 10th-generation iPad. But Apple likes to do its best hardware work on its highest-end devices, and this Pro looks like it holds up the tradition nicely.
For the last five years or so, Apple’s iPad has been on the back burner, although there have been plenty of other gadgets, including an augmented reality headset and a mixed reality headset. Now the wait is finally over. During its virtual event today, Apple announced the next-generation iPad Pro and iPad Air, an all-new M4 chip, as well as updated accessories.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has been indicating that the company will be adding new Artificial Intelligence features in the near future during its earnings calls. Although Apple didn’t get into AI-specific features, it’s seemingly laying the AI groundwork with the new M4.
